{"id":38,"date":"2020-02-02T19:18:54","date_gmt":"2020-02-02T19:18:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/?page_id=38"},"modified":"2020-08-04T00:46:42","modified_gmt":"2020-08-04T00:46:42","slug":"manuscript","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/manuscript\/","title":{"rendered":"Initial Manuscript"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

*Note: The period for public comment on the initial manuscript ended April 10, 2020. The revised manuscript<\/a> is now open for comments.* <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

History Can <\/em>Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2006, 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 1<\/a><\/sup> Wikipedia\u2019s anarchic editing process and uneven reliability have repelled academics. Despite studies\u2014including Rosenzweig\u2019s\u2014comparing it favorably to traditional encyclopedias, it\u2019s still the sour taste of \u201cWikipedia\u201d that spoils much discussion of \u201copen source\u201d history, particularly outside of the digital humanities. But Rosenzweig wrote that \u201cif historians believe that what is available free on the Web is low quality, then we have a responsibility to make better information sources available online.\u201d Historians could endlessly indict Wikipedia for its many shortcomings, or, he said, we could \u201cemulate [its] great democratic triumph \u2026 its demonstration that people are eager for free and accessible information resources.\u201d 2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirteen\nyears after Rosenzweig\u2019s plea, technological innovation, institutional\nresources, professional norms, and shifting scholarly attitudes have converged\nto prove Rosenzweig right: history can <\/em>be\nopen source. And yet, while scores of projects have sought to fulfill\nRosenzweig\u2019s call by providing free, high-quality, professionally produced,\npeer-reviewed materials, the historical profession has rarely stopped to take\ncritical stock of Open Educational Resources (OER) and the broader ideological context from which\nit emerged. 3<\/a><\/sup>\nThis article therefore proposes to provide a critical evaluation of OER\u2019s place\nin the historical profession\u2014its history, the nature of open licensing, debates\nover neoliberalism, the problematic emphasis on digital \u201caccess,\u201d the promise\nof mass collaboration, and an evaluation of major trends in contemporary\ndigital history projects. In particular, by analyzing the founding values and\nshort history of the digital history movement, surveying the current landscape\nof digital history, and identifying the possibilities of increasing\nprofessional and institutional support, it highlights the often problematic,\nand yet foundational, democratic aspirations at the heart of digital history\nand the broader digital humanities movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

— — —<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dream of \u201cdemocratization\u201d fueled much of\nthe rise of digital humanities. In 2001, information studies scholar Philip E.\nAgre argued that digital technologies would enable \u201cthe intellectual lives of\nacademics to be democratized,\u201d thereby opening the \u201cexisting scholarly and\nlibrary practices [that] reflect the wisdom of centuries. 4<\/a><\/sup> Writing in\n1999, Ed Ayers trumpeted the historical profession\u2019s recovery of forgotten\nvoices\u2014of women, people of color, the poor\u2014but said,\u201d The great democratization\nof history over the past few decades has not been accompanied by a\ndemocratization of audience.\u201d 5<\/a><\/sup> The digital humanities, it was argued, would facilitate\nthat democratization. \u201cIn the 1990s, the animating spirit behind much of our\nwork in the digital humanities was democratization,\u201d said William G. Thomas\nIII, a historian at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. \u201cOur ambitions then,\u201d\nhe said, \u201cwere only secondarily to experiment with new forms of scholarship.\nThey were primarily to democratize history: to transform the way history was\nunderstood by changing the way it was produced and accessed.\u201d 6<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nrhetoric of \u201cdemocratization\u201d continues to permeate the field of digital history.\nIt lurks in project descriptions, grant applications, and in the fundamental\nunderstanding that justifies so much of a now-mature field. And invocations of\ndemocracy not only provided the rhetorical cornerstone of the field\u2019s rise to\nprominence, they undergird the larger promise of the digital humanities. But what does \u201cdemocracy\u201d mean in\na world of ArcGIS databases, GitHub repositories, Creative Commons licenses,\nPython tokens, Gephi visualizations, and 3ds Max models (not to mention Twitter\nand all the rest)? \u201cDemocracy,\u201d John Dewey wrote in 1916, \u201chas\nto be born anew every generation,\u201d and a survey of major digital projects and\nwritings in the field reveals how digital historians have labored to realize\nnew, refashioned notions of democracy through the life of a rising academic\nfield. But such a survey also lays bare the unexplored tensions and\ncontradictions of discourses that have, by and large, escaped serious academic\nscrutiny. 7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silicon\nValley\u2019s prophets may preach the \u201ctheory of disruptive innovation\u201d to eager\nuniversity administrators with the promise of inevitable democratic\nrevolutions, but disruption is not a synonym for democracy. 8<\/a><\/sup> As Roy Rosenzweig\nput it, \u201cneither the democratization or the commodification of higher education\nis inherent in technology.\u201d 9<\/a><\/sup> Advocates of\nthe digital humanities have gilded their technological innovations with the\nrhetoric of democracy, but few scholars have interrogated either the nature of\nthose discourses or their impact upon the field\u2019s development, maturation, and\nfuture direction. This article therefore confronts the\nomnipresence of \u201cdemocracy\u201d in the field of digital history by placing the\nfield\u2019s rise in a historical and institutional context, confronting the\ncomplexities, ironies, and puzzles posed by its advocates, and, finally,\ngesturing toward a\npositive definition of \u201cdemocracy\u201d that moves beyond questions of technological\ninnovation and digital access to engage more fundamental and intractable\nquestions about inequality, community, and participatory historical inquiry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDemocracy\u201d is a\nslippery term. In his\nmonumental 2016 exploration of \u201cthe struggle for self-rule\u201d in the Atlantic\nworld, Toward Democracy<\/em>, Historian James T. Kloppenberg argued that democracy has been less a\nunified set of institutions and more an unattainable goal after which we must\nforever strive. 10<\/a><\/sup>\nVague, often unreflective ideas of \u201cdemocracy\u201d drove much of the development of\nthe field of digital history. And yet, despite their penchant for definitional\nimprecision, digital historians have associated democracy with practices rooted\nin evolving understandings of structural inequalities. We therefore identify\nand critically analyze two major strains of democratic ideology in digital\nhistory and the digital humanities more broadly\u2014one rooted in open access and\none rooted in participation\u2014to capture the key shifts, creative tensions, and\nurgent critiques of the digital humanities movement. 11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lured by the promises of the early internet, the first\ngeneration of digital humanists believed the digitization of analog resources\nwould tear down barriers that held back the world\u2019s knowledge from popular\ndemand. Navigating a rising ideological and institutional neoliberalism, they\nchampioned open access and pushed OER into the mainstream. The gains of that\nearly movement are impossible to overstate. But a recent generation of digital\nhumanists, reared not in an insurgent and utopian field but in a respectable\nand increasingly institutionalized one, learned that digitization is not\nenough. Instead, repelled by the decadence of Silicon Valley, frustrated with\nthe political economy of academia, and inspired especially by the scholarship\nof intersectional feminists and critical race theorists, they have striven for\nan expanded idea of democracy, one cognizant of stubborn structural\ninequalities and lingering institutional barriers to full participation in the\nproduction and consumption of digital projects. Like Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, they \u201cwonder how digital\npractices and projects might participate in more radical processes of\ntransformation\u2013\u2013might rattle the poles of the big tent rather than slip\nseamlessly into it.\u201d 12<\/a><\/sup>\nJohn Dewey argued in 1939 that \u201cthe task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer\nand more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.\u201d 13<\/a><\/sup>\nGrappling with the\npractice of digital humanities and analyzing its maturation as an academic\nfield, particularly in light of its contemporary critics, therefore demands a\ncritical engagement with the field\u2019s long quest for \u201cdemocracy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDemocracy\u201d\nand \u201cdemocratization,\u201d of course, drove the study of the American past long\nbefore the rise of the digital humanities. From Alexis\nde Tocqueville to Jane Addams to Alain Locke, positive definitions of\n\u201cdemocracy\u201d have fueled investigations into the nature of American life. 14<\/a><\/sup>\nDefending American studies as a field of inquiry at Yale in 1958, Norman Holmes\nPearson claimed that students \u201cmust be educated to think of democracy not in\nnarrow or formalistic political terms, but as a germinal impulse with profound\nbearings upon every phase of human activity.\u201d 15<\/a><\/sup> And\nhistorians have not only defined, interrogated, and deployed democracy as a\nfocus of study in the making and unmaking of countless national narratives,\nthey have carried that pursuit into the digital age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the early energy propelling digital humanities would take inspiration from New Left ideas of participatory democracy that swirled around universities in the 1960s. 16<\/a><\/sup> Most historically-minded computing in the 1960s and 1970s was confined to a core of \u201ccliometric\u201d historians, but the ideals of the New Left would shape the field of digital humanities. 17<\/a><\/sup> Roy Rosenzweig\u2019s pioneering work, for instance, 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 18<\/a><\/sup> 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\u2014the notion of shared knowledge and pioneered the principles that would later undergird digital history\u2019s push for \u201cdemocratization.\u201d 19<\/a><\/sup> 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. 20<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But early\ndigital humanists struggled to realize the democratic dreams of New Left\nactivists. \u201cDemocratization\u201d too easily lost precise meaning in the scramble to\nadopt new technologies. Outside of academia, where \u201cdemocracy\u201d was left\nparticularly ambiguous, notions of world-flattening offered moral cover for the\ndecidedly anti-democratic ends of business. Inside the academy practitioners\ntoo often confused \u201caccess\u201d with \u201cdemocracy\u201d and lost sight of participatory\npossibilities. A survey of early digital projects shows how. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1995, the\nAmerican Studies Crossroads Project<\/em>,\none of the earliest websites of any humanities organization, led English\nscholar Randy Bass to partner with historian Brett Eynon to lead the Visible Knowledge Project<\/em>. Bass and his collaborators privileged pedagogical\ninnovation and student participation over expanded access. 21<\/a><\/sup> In hindsight, they appear outliers. Most of the\ndigital humanities\u2019 would-be democratizers equated democratization with\nexpanded accessibility. While discussing the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)\u2014an\neffort to establish digital standards of textual presentation\u2014at the 1994\nmeeting of the Modern Language Association, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen identified\nthree fundamental requirements for scholarly editions of electronic text:\n\u201caccessibility without needless technical barriers to use; longevity; and\nintellectual integrity.\u201d 22<\/a><\/sup>\nEarly digital humanities projects followed suit. The Women\u2019s Writers Project<\/em>, launched in\n1999, used TEI standards \u201cto overcome the problems of inaccessibility and\nscarcity which had rendered women’s writing invisible for so long.\u201d 23<\/a><\/sup> In 1995, two Virginia scholars launched The\nWalt Whitman Archive<\/em>, <\/em>a\ncollection of digital manuscript facsimiles and hypertext editions of Whitman\u2019s\npoems that aimed to make all of\nWhitman\u2019s public and private work \navailable to all. 24<\/a><\/sup> The William Blake Archive<\/em> similarly launched free and online in 1996 to\n\u201cprovide unified access to major works of visual and literary art.\u201d 25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

American historians were similarly\nstriving to expand access to scholarly work through digital presentation. In\n1993, Edward Ayers and a large, rotating team at\nthe University of Virginia launched The Valley of the Shadow<\/em> as \u201can\napplied experiment in digital scholarship.\u201d The project was a digital archive:\nit allowed users to freely compare letters, newspapers, maps, official records,\nand a wealth of other digitized sources from two counties, Franklin County,\nPennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia (one Union and one Confederate)\nbefore, during, and after the Civil War. It was also, wrote Michael O\u2019Malley\nand Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cprobably the most sophisticated historical site on the\nWeb.\u201d 26<\/a><\/sup> Gary Kornblith wrote in The Journal of\nAmerican Histor<\/em>y <\/em>that the project\n\u201crepresents the logical outcome of major trends in late-twentieth-century\nAmerican academic life: computerization, interdisciplinary collaboration, the\npostmodern complication of traditional narrative, and the democratic search for\nways to recognize, even celebrate, the role of ordinary people in making\nhistory and culture.\u201d 27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The field of \u201cdigital humanities\u201d\u2014a phrase\nnot yet widely used\u2014was busy being born. In 1994, Roy Rosenzweig, then a\npioneering social historian at George Mason University, founded the Center for\nHistory and New Media (CHNM) to \u201cincorporate multiple voices, reach diverse\naudiences and encourage popular presentation in presenting and preserving the\npast\u201d 28<\/a><\/sup> Rosenzweig worked with the American Social History\nProject to produce pedagogical CD-ROMs. 29<\/a><\/sup> In 1998, Edward Ayers and William Thomas formed the Virginia\nCenter for Digital History at the University of Virginia. 30<\/a><\/sup> New projects launched. At the University of Houston, Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil pioneered a free (though not\nyet \u201copen,\u201d since the ubiquity of open licensing was still to come) digital\nhistory text, Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching\nand Research<\/em>(<\/a>http:\/\/www.digitalhistory.uh.edu\/<\/a>),<\/em> providing an\nenduring example of a practical, student-centered project that also explored\u2014in\nits case, through \u201chyperlink history\u201d\u2014the new possibilities afforded by its digital\nplatform. In 1998, the CHNM launched History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course\non the Web<\/em> (http:\/\/historymatters.gmu.edu\/), a vast collection of primary\nsources, pedagogical essays, syllabi, reference material, and other teaching\ntools. As these projects demonstrated, online access remained the defining\nfeature of \u201cdemocratic\u201d digital scholarship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Spiro, in\nher essay \u201cDefining the Values of the Digital Humanities,\u201d argued that a set of\ncore values, rather than traditional disciplinary boundaries, demarcated\n\u201cdigital humanities.\u201d Surveying Digital Humanities manifestoes and combing the\nrhetoric of the young field, 31<\/a><\/sup> she proposed\n\u201copenness\u201d as the first of five values governing the field. 32<\/a><\/sup> She defined openness not only in the sense of\nlicensing and transparency, but in the \u201clarger goal of the humanities,\u201d to, in\nthe words of Bridget Draxler and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology\nAlliance (HASTAC), \u201cto democratize knowledge to reach out to \u2018publics,\u2019 share\nacademic discoveries, and invite an array of audiences to participate in\nknowledge production.\u201d 33<\/a><\/sup>\nSuch statements, of course, saturate much of\nthe rhetoric championing digital humanities and the open access movement. \u201cMany\nscholars hope and anticipate that open practices,\u201d two digital humanists,\nGeorge Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons, wrote, \u201cwill broaden access to education\nand knowledge, reduce costs, enhance the impact and reach of scholarship and\neducation, and foster the development of more equitable, effective, efficient,\nand transparent scholarly and educational processes.\u201d 34<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democratization, in other words, was integral\nto the definition of the digital humanities from the very beginning. Andrea\nHunter, writing in the Canadian Journal of Communication<\/em>in 2015, argued that democratization\nwas the best answer to the field\u2019s chronic definitional question: \u201cWhat is the\ndigital humanities?\u201d Hunter advocated reframing the field away from technology\nby emphasizing gains in \u201caccess and participation.\u201d Only through\ndemocratization, she argued, could the digital humanities realize its\ndisciplinary promise. 35<\/a><\/sup> To illustrate\nher argument, Hunter specifically cited projects: The Orlando Project<\/em> (http:\/\/orlando.cambridge.org\/<\/a>), a\nself-described \u201cnew kind of electronic textbase for research and discovery\u201d\nproduced by the University of Alberta and the University of Guelph that\nrevolves around \u201cWomen\u2019s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to\nthe Present\u201d; and CHNM\u2019s Omeka (https:\/\/omeka.org\/<\/a>), a digital\nplatform designed to allow users to curate and share their own historical\narchives. The first project was designed to bring obscure sources online and out\nof the archive; the second to allow users to become historians themselves. Both\naimed 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 field 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 36<\/a><\/sup><\/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. 37<\/a><\/sup> The digital revolution brought open licensing into the mainstream with the establishment of Creative Commons in 2001. 38<\/a><\/sup> 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 39<\/a><\/sup> 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. 40<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOpen access,\u201d however, remains a relatively new idea for many historians outside of the digital humanities. 41<\/a><\/sup> In a notice appended to their 2014 open monograph, The History Manifesto<\/em>, historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi 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 42<\/a><\/sup> But already, as advocate Martin Weller put it, \u201copenness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment.\u201d 43<\/a><\/sup> 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 44<\/a><\/sup> And this is where many projects have stalled\u2014until recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In just a few short years, barriers to\nparticipation in digital humanities have fallen and institutional supports have\nrisen. New publishing venues for open-source scholarship and pedagogy,\nstreamlined digital platforms and lowered technological barriers, massive\ninjections of public and private grant money, the institutionalization of\ndigital humanities in research universities, the development of scholarly\nguidelines and best practices, and the growing acceptance of open-source\nscholarship and pedagogy among the academic community: all have created the\nconditions for a digitized history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A wealth of funding has buoyed DH across\nAmerican universities. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the\nAndrew W. Mellon Foundation in particular seeded the institutional bedrocks of digital\nhistory and continue to fund many of the current initiatives reshaping the\nfield. The NEH, for instance, whose charter declares that \u201cthe humanities\nbelong to the people of the United States,\u201d spun off a new Office of Digital\nHumanities in 2008. In 2015, citing an \u201curgent and compelling\u201d need to pioneer\ndigital publishing, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded several\nmillion-dollar grants to university presses for the exploration of digital\npublishing models. 45<\/a><\/sup> Other wealthy foundations have focused on digital\npublication. Yale University Library, for instance, received a $3 million grant\nin 2014 from The Goizueta Foundation to launch a Digital Humanities Laboratory. 46<\/a><\/sup> It is just one of many new ventures that have smashed\nbarriers to online \u201cpublication\u201d with appeals for expanded access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Daniel\nCohen, in the same year that Rosenzweig penned his plea for open source\nhistory, said \u201cResources that are free to use in any way, even if they are\nimperfect, are more valuable than those that are gated or use-restricted, even\nif those resources are qualitatively better.\u201d 47<\/a><\/sup> And while popular suspicions about the quality of open\nresources continue to limit adoption, recent polls have shown that academics\nare not fundamentally opposed to open projects, provided they can be reassured\nthat they are using a rigorous product. 48<\/a><\/sup> But without the safety net of peer review to fall back\non, how can digital humanities projects win over hesitant academics? As Martin\nPaul Eve writes, \u201cany transition to open access must necessarily interact with\nthe value systems of the academy and its publishing mechanisms.\u201d 49<\/a><\/sup> Fortunately those very publishing mechanisms have begun\nto embrace open access, harkening a radical change in academia\u2019s prestige\neconomy: scholars can now remain within existing academic structures even as\nthey 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. 50<\/a><\/sup> 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

In the intervening years, university presses\nhave continued to move forward into open access publication and several presses\nhave launched open-access imprints. \u201cIf there ever was a time for a university press to go into open\naccess,\u201d said Neil B. Christensen, the director of digital business development\nfor the University of California Press, \u201cthis is the time.\u201d In 2015, the\nPress launched dual platforms for publishing open-access journals and\nmonographs, Collabra <\/em>and Luminos. 51<\/a><\/sup> (Striving for long-term sustainability, however, the venture\u2019s open-access\nbusiness model revolves around authors\u2019 fees and paid reviewers, and charging\nauthors anything at all, let alone $600-$700, is largely foreign to academic\nhistorians.) In 2012, the University of Minnesota, through the William and Flora\nHewlett Foundation, launched The Open Textbook Initiative, a catalog of online,\nopen-license textbooks. In 2018, The Graduate Center\u2019s Digital Scholarship Lab\nat the City University of New York received a nearly one-million-dollar grant\nfrom the Mellon Foundation to develop Manifold, an open-source web-based\npublishing platform. 52<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advocates of OER have also continued\nexperimenting with alternative models of sustainable, open-source publishing.\n\u201cAccess to the work we produce must be opened up as a site of conversation not\njust among scholars but also between scholars and the broader culture,\u201d wrote  Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Planned\nObsolescence<\/em>, her exploration into the future of technology and academic\npublishing. 53<\/a><\/sup> In 2015,\nCaroline Edwards and Martin Paul Eve launched the Open Library of Humanities\n(OLH), with grant money from the Mellon Foundation and partnerships with\nuniversity libraries, to provide a new, sustainable, open-access publishing\nplatform for the humanities. 54<\/a><\/sup> University\nlibraries, meanwhile, continue to experiment with publishing models. \u201cIf making\nscholarly research publicly accessible on the Web could go some way toward\nenlightening the general public about the importance and the skill of scholarly\nwork,\u201d Brown University\u2019s faculty dean, Kevin McLaughlin, said, \u201cthat would be\nfantastic.\u201d 45<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gold standard of academic scholarship\nremains the university press, and, over the past years many have incorporated\nopen publishing into their regular imprints. In 2006, The Orlando Project<\/em> turned to a traditional press, Cambridge, to\n\u201cpublish\u201d the project. Cambridge\u2019s agreement marked a turning point in academic\nlegitimation of open source publishing. \u201cThey are the name,\u201d a producer of the\nproject said, \u201cthey have standards.\u201d 55<\/a><\/sup> Cambridge in\nparticular has continued to experiment with open access. Their 2014 publication\nof The History Manifesto<\/em>, a book-length essay by historians Jo Guldi and\nDavid Armitage, marked a new highpoint of academic respectability for open\naccess publication in the history profession. 56<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cambridge is not alone. As already discussed,\nthe University of Virginia Press has long published projects online, if not\nnecessarily with formal open access. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology\nPress has published multiple field-defining books online through both an open\nreview and open licensing. The University of Michigan, from 2011 to 2013,\noversaw the open peer review and eventual dual publishing of Writing History\nin the Digital Age<\/em> at the same time the University of Minnesota similarly\npublished Debates in the Digital\nHumanities<\/em>. Beginning in 2019, the Public Library of Science began to allow\nauthors to participate in their version of an open review, where readers\nreports, editorial decisions, and author responses are all made publicly\navailable. 57<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Digitization by\nitself did not guarantee the broad-based notion of \u201cdemocracy\u201d so ardently\ntouted by early champions of the digital humanities.  Robert Darnton, distinguished historian and\nlibrarian at Harvard University, examined Google\u2019s massive book digitization\nproject 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\nmust open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the\ngame, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking\ninspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of\nLearning.\u201d 58<\/a><\/sup> Such language has done important work for the field, and\ngreat strides have been made in expanding access under the banner of\ndemocratization. At its worst, the Digital Humanities can seem an esoteric\nworld, one more concerned with the code that goes into projects but not with\nthe products that come out. New endeavors can seem designed to win grants, but\nnot users. 59<\/a><\/sup> The digital humanities have expanded rapidly over the\nintervening decades, and yet, William Thomas lamented in 2012, \u201cWe are in\ndanger of losing that animating spirit, and we need to recover the\ndemocratization at the heart of the Digital Humanities movement.\u201d 60<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collision\nof technology and the humanities incites hyperbole: utopians dream of\ntechnological revolutions in research and a democratized world of free\nlearning; skeptics warn of a predatory neoliberalism and privatized,\nprofit-driven scholarship and pedagogy that privilege shallow instruction from\nde-skilled educators. As early as 1999, Rosenzweig himself, writing in a review\nessay for the American Quarterly<\/em>, lamented the \u201cbifurcated tendency\ntoward visions of utopia and dystopia\u201d in discussions surrounding digital\nhumanities. 61<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades,\nthe disruption-minded, messianic rhetoric of Silicon Valley has overlaid digital\nhistory with the moral appeal of democratized scholarship and pedagogy. Siva Vaidhyanathan, writing in the American Quarterly<\/em> in 2006, called for\ndigital humanists to challenge techno-fundamentalism, \u201cthe misguided faith in\ntechnology and progress.\u201d 62<\/a><\/sup> Critics note\nthat the self-important utopian rhetoric surrounding the digital humanities\noften mirrors the language and reflects the libertarian social values of\nSilicon Valley. 63<\/a><\/sup> The rhetorical similarities between digital\nhumanities and Silicon Valley are stark. A typical claim made by a commentator in 2010 is\nindicative: \u201cThe digital humanities should not be about the digital at all.\nIt\u2019s all about innovation and disruption. The digital humanities is really an\ninsurgent humanities.\u201d 64<\/a><\/sup> It is a\nnecessary criticism that much of the rhetoric justifying academic and educational\n\u201cdisruptions\u201d can conceal ulterior motives. 65<\/a><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The specter of facilitating the de-skilling\nof education\u2014manifested most obviously in the shrinking of the ranks of\nfull-time faculty\u2014and competing for the patronage of\nbillionaire-philanthropists and endowment-bureaucracies while touting \u201cinnovation,\u201d \u201cdisruption,\u201d and\n\u201cdemocratization\u201d haunts the Digital Humanities. 66<\/a><\/sup> Wendy\nHui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley wrote in 2016 of\nthe \u201cThe Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,\u201d arguing that the \u201csame\nneoliberal logic that informs the ongoing destruction of the mainstream\nhumanities has encouraged\u201d the growth of digital humanities as a field. 67<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same summer, three academics writing in\nthe Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>blamed\ndigital humanities for abetting the neoliberalization of the American academy.\n\u201cDespite the aggressive\npromotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency,\u201d they wrote, \u201cits\ninstitutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of\npolitically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the\nmanufacture of digital tools and archives.\u201d 68<\/a><\/sup> Singling out the digital humanities turn in\nEnglish, they characterized digital humanists\u2019 utopian rhetoric as a\nself-serving veil concealing the move toward computation over interpretation,\nexternal funding over institutional support, and general\nadministration-supported corporatism over traditional academic labor. The\nauthors placed much of the impetus for the Digital Humanities to what they saw\nas a conservative core of literary scholars at the University of Virginia who\ncrystallized the parameters of the field between 1999 and 2002. 69<\/a><\/sup> Such critiques must be made and met. The\nTrojan Horse dangers of \u201cdisruption\u201d can certainly overshadow the promise of a\ndemocratized history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issue of\nfree labor, for instance, can taint open-access projects. In the neoliberal\nacademy, scholars are expected to offer more and more of their labor without\ndue compensation or recognition. But few beyond a small circle of prominent\nscholars receive significant compensation for writing articles, books, or\ntextbooks. And yet, in spite of that lack of remuneration, as Stevan Harnard\npointed out in his groundbreaking 1994 \u201csubversive proposal,\u201d an early call for\nscholarly research papers to be archived online, open access is possible\nbecause academics\u2014whose salaries are already paid by universities\u2014produce what\nhe calls \u201cesoteric\u201d work: work, that is, grounded in an internal economy driven\nby readership and impact, not profits. 70<\/a><\/sup> A copyright designed to protect an author\u2019s personal\nprofits hardly makes sense for the bulk of academics who receive no profits to\nprotect. As Martin Paul Eve put it, \u201cwhy should academics retain the economic\nprotections of copyright if they are not dependent upon the system of\nremuneration that this is supposed to uphold?\u201d 71<\/a><\/sup> In a digital world in which the marginal cost of\nreproduction is nil, open access advocates such as John Willinsky and Creative\nCommons\u2019 Cable Green argue that academics have an ethical obligation as\nhumanists to share our work and our knowledge with the public and with our\nstudents. 72<\/a><\/sup> And, given the gravity of the current cost crisis in\nhigher education, such work seems increasingly imperative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet,\ndespite the proliferation of digital history and positive shifts in\nprofessional norms, was William Thomas right to argue in 2012 that \u201cwe are in\ndanger of losing that animating spirit\u201d of democratization? 60<\/a><\/sup> Certainly the\nfield\u2019s massive grants and vast institutional backing should be for naught if\nthe digital humanities drifted further from its democratic promise. Digital history\nbetrays its core principles if it fails to engage users by privileging\nprofessional advancement, grant-winning, and innovation-for-innovation\u2019s-sake\nover the pursuit of readership, ease of use, and pedagogical utility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than some manifestation of a nefarious\nneoliberal plot, perhaps the engines of digital history are simply by their\nnature self-destructive and the very hunger for innovation which spawned the\nfield must inevitably condemn it to irrelevance. Perhaps democratization must\nbe sacrificed to the gods of \u201cdisruption.\u201d In 1992, Richard Jensen, a historian\nat the University of Illinois at Chicago, founded H-Net as an electronic means\nto link historians around the world. By 2012, its various lists claimed 10,000\nsubscribers. 73<\/a><\/sup> But, built for an earlier iteration of electronic\ncommunication, the old listserv platform needed updating. After a vigorous\nfund-raising effort, H-Net relaunched as H-Net Commons in 2018, a new platform\ncapable of hosting blogs, moderated discussions, customized user home pages,\nand curated content collections. It met every requirement of the new \u201cweb 2.0\u201d:\nit was customizable, iterative, and connective. But it collapsed H-Net\u2019s\ncommunities and the project shed thousands of users. A bloated interface,\nclunky navigability, and an overall confusing experience propelled the very\nmigration to platforms such as Twitter that the Commons was meant to staunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet the idea of the Commons reinforced the conception that, despite\nmuch of the early rhetoric in the field, digitization does not mean\n\u201cdemocracy.\u201d In their pursuit of new projects and new grants, for instance,\nscholars have long been content to dump information online and call it\n\u201cdemocracy.\u201d 74<\/a><\/sup> Instead, as historian Patricia\nLimerick noted in 1997, \u201cwe are in much greater need of methods and strategies\nfor filtering, sorting, managing, synthesizing\u201d than simply finding new ways to\naccess information that will never really be consumed. 75<\/a><\/sup> Little has changed in two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lack of sophisticated,\nprofessionally curated textbooks\u2014a major impetus of Rosenzweig’s call for open\nsource history–testifies to the many blind spots of democratized knowledge.\nTraditional rather than disruptive, pedagogical rather than research-based,\neye-glazing rather than grant-winning, textbooks are nevertheless the most\nwidely used tool in humanities classrooms. Mintz and McNeil recognized this as\nearly as the 1990s with their Digital\nHistory <\/em>survey text, but few academics followed them. 76<\/a><\/sup> Nowhere else\nare current costs and potential savings quite so clear and many outside of\nacademia have long recognized the democratic and cost-annihilating potential of\nopen texts. A closer look at textbooks in history and literature is revealing.\nFor decades, scholars have allowed responsibility for textbook creation to fall\nupon for-profit education companies, unwieldy non-profit bureaucracies,\nunder-resourced lone wolves, and unregulated open wikis. Perhaps Wikipedia,\ndespite Rosenzweig’s plea, poisoned historians\u2019 attitudes toward open texts. A\n2014 \u201cTextbooks and Teaching\u201d roundtable in the Journal of American History<\/em>\ncited only the unreliability of open texts, rather than their promise. 77<\/a><\/sup> For years,\nthe construction of an open-licensed, collaborative textbook fell to the\neducational industrial complex and its network of funder-disrupters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\n2014, we proposed a new model for history textbooks. After a year-long\ncollaboration, over 350 historians produced the first edition of The\nAmerican Yawp<\/em>(www.americanyawp.com<\/a>), an open American history textbook project.\nWe launched the project as a radical experiment in mass collaboration and\ninstitution-free pedagogy\u2014an experiment that hundreds of thousands of users now\nbenefit from each year. But the Yawp<\/em>\nwas only a logical extension of the democratic promise inherent not just in the\nrise of the digital humanities as an identifiable academic field, but in a\nmoment when technological innovation, institutional resources, professional\nnorms, and shifting scholarly attitudes have converged to prove Rosenzweig\nright: history can <\/em>be open source. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ours is not the only project to emphasize the democratic 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. 78<\/a><\/sup> 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 include 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 79<\/a><\/sup> For some, the expansions in participatory culture promise to shatter nearly all hierarchies and replace them with egalitarian, collaborative relationships. 80<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, even\nwhile digital humanities practitioners frequently use \u201cdemocracy\u201d as shorthand\nfor expanded digital access, even a broader emphasis on participation can elide\nstructural inequalities. Issues of gender, racial, and sexual representation,\nfor instance, dominate humanistic inquiry but continue to plague the practice\nand production of the digital humanities. Miriam Posner argued in 2016 that the\nfield must confront these questions, but \u201cto truly engage in this kind of\ncritical work .\u2026 would require dismantling and rebuilding much of the\norganizing logic that underlies our work.\u201d 81<\/a><\/sup> Similar\nessays by Tara McPherson\u2014\u201cWhy Are the Digital Humanities So White?\u201d\u2014Bethany\nNowviskie\u2014\u201cWhat Do Girls Dig?\u201d\u2014and host of other critics hint at problems that\nare foundational and cannot be solved through modest organizational statements\nor more equitable faculty appointments and grant disbursements. 82<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Sharon Leon, the very act of\ndefining the discipline of digital history reinforces inequality. Leon, for\ninstance, argues that women, especially women of color, have been especially\neager to connect digital work to community needs and that an overemphasis on\nthe production of research as the foundation of DH thereby privileges male\nimperatives. 83<\/a><\/sup> An uncritically engaged practice of the\ndigital humanities, critics therefore rightfully argue, belies decades of\n\u201cdemocratic\u201d longings and will continue to weigh upon the field as its enters\nits maturity. 84<\/a><\/sup> As\ndigital humanists institutionalize themselves further into the landscape of\nhigher education, they must conceive of themselves less as underdogs and\nrevolutionaries than as gatekeepers. 85<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The digital humanities, of course, do not have a\nmonopoly on democracy discourse. In fact, some of the most active practitioners\noperate outside of the digital humanities. The Democratizing Knowledge Project<\/em> <\/em>at Syracuse\nUniversity, for example, draws from an impressively interdisciplinary core\nfaculty and eschews digital practice in favor of analog forms of scholarship\nand activism. Through an annual summer institute, campus forums, creative\npedagogy, and connections beyond the walls of the academy, the project pursues\nits goal of \u201cconfronting white privilege, hegemonic masculinity,\nheteronormativity, and colonial heritages.\u201d 86<\/a><\/sup> The\nfield of public history, for instance, has long emphasized public\nparticipation. 87<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arguments for a participatory digital history have likewise become\nincreasingly visible. Laurenellen McCann has argued publicly that digital\nprojects must work with <\/em>communities,\nnot for<\/em> them. 88<\/a><\/sup> By annihilating the distance between the production and\nconsumption of knowledge, the authors of Digital_Humanities\n<\/em>argue, digital humanists \u201care able to revitalize the cultural record in\nways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy\ninto the expanded public sphere.\u201d 89<\/a><\/sup> Sharon Leon, for\ninstance, in her presentation of \u201cdigital public history\u201d work, has emphasized\nthe idea of a digital \u201cuser-centered history.\u201d 90<\/a><\/sup> Digital humanities\nprojects have therefore at times taken seriously a participatory form of\ndemocratization. 91<\/a><\/sup>\nThe Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is one such example. After providing a host\nof maps and other material on \u201cthe dispossession and resistance by San\nFrancisco Bay area residents,\u201d the project included a link for users to \u201cHelp\nStop Evictions\u201d by donating to the \u201cnot-for-profit collective,\u201d reporting\nillegal vacation rentals, supporting local unions, avoiding calling police on\nneighbors, and pledging to abstain from renting from anyone who has\nunscrupulous landlords. 92<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Projects like the Anti-Eviction\nMapping Project show that technology cannot be the only defining feature of\ndigital history or of the broader digital humanities. Miriam Posner, for\ninstance, has warned against the fetishization of code among digital humanists,\narguing that, for instance, calls to encourage women and persons of color to\nlearn to code fail to confront longstanding structural inequalities. 93<\/a><\/sup> And\neven code, critics argue, is not valueless. \u201cThere is no such\nthing as a \u2018merely technical\u2019 design decision,\u201d wrote Julia Flanders. \u201cOur\ntechnical systems are meaning systems and ideological systems.\u201d 94<\/a><\/sup> Safiya\nNoble, likewise, argues that \u201cthe political, social and economic dimensions of\ntechnologies\u201d are all \u201cco-constituted in racialized and gendered ways that\ninvolve power and often foster and maintain systematic discrimination and\noppression.\u201d 95<\/a><\/sup> Kim Gallon calls for\n\u201ca technology of recovery, characterized by efforts to bring forth the full\nhumanity of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and\ntools.\u201d Digital historians, such calls suggest, must work to recover not just\nlost voices but paradigms of imagination occluded by longstanding power\ninequalities. Gallon champions the \u201cblack digitial humanities,\u201d which, she\nargues, \u201ctroubles the very core of what we have come to know as the humanities\nby recovering alternate constructions of humanity that have been historically\nexcluded from that concept.\u201d 96<\/a><\/sup> Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, micha c\u00e1rdenas, Jacob Gaboury,\nJessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee, drawing on the work of queer theorist\nKara Keeling, created QueerOS to confront the inequalities embedded in our\ndigital tools. 97<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical race and gender studies, as such comments show, have\noffered the most pointed criticisms of DH and reminds practitioners that\ndemocratization demands a reckoning with deeper, structural inequalities. 98<\/a><\/sup> Lisa Nakamura, for instance,\nargues that race and racism suffuse our digital lives. 99<\/a><\/sup> Whiteness,\ncritics argue, suffuses the field. 100<\/a><\/sup> Coding has been\nthoroughly gendered. 101<\/a><\/sup> Black\nfeminists such as Safiya Umoja Noble\u2014who urges digital humanities to \u201cconsider\nthe degree to which our very reliance on digital tools \u2026 exacerbates existing\npatterns of exploitation and at times even creates new ones\u201d\u2014continue to shine\na light on patterns of marginalization that lurk in supposedly value-neutral\ndigital worlds. 102<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pedagogically minded\ndigital humanities projects have especially taken these criticisms to heart.\nWilliam Thomas and Elizabeth Lorang, for instance, advocated \u201can alternative\nmodality of engagement with the digital on our campuses\u2014one built around reciprocity,\nopenness, local community, and particularity.\u201d 103<\/a><\/sup> Amy E. Earhart of Texas A&M, a large public land-grant\nuniversity, and Toniesha L. Taylor of Prairie View A&M, a nearby\nhistorically black land-grant university, turned these ideas into practice.\nTheir White Violence, Black Resistance\nProject<\/em> sought not only to \u201cbring to light timely historical documents\u201d but\nalso, employing students from both institutions, to \u201cexpose power differentials\nin our own institutional settings.\u201d 104<\/a><\/sup>\nSuch projects remind us that, however well-funded and well-defined it becomes as an academic\nfield, the digital humanities betrays its founding principles if it remains\nconfined to an esoteric community of coders and tech-utopians. It must be\npracticed with fundamental ends in mind. It must be designed to be used. It\nmust privilege accessibility. It must seek out readers and reach actual users.\nAnd it must draw upon the insights of humanities scholarship to push the\nboundaries of what democracy means by exposing and confronting the inequalities\nthat suffuse our objects of study as well as our professional structures.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital history\nis certainly capable of refashioning professional paradigms. Its much-touted\nemphasis on collaboration, for instance, cannot be underestimated. In 2011, AHA\npresident Anthony Grafton urged historians to reject the myth of the solitary\nscholar. Arguing against Wilhelm von Humboldt\u2019s idealization of \u201cloneliness and\nfreedom\u201d as the hallmarks of academic life, Grafton wrote, \u201cthere is much to be\ngained by recognizing, and promoting, collaboration \u2026 and, with it, the\nelements of joy and creative fantasy that can too easily be lost as we go about\nour traditionally lonely craft.\u201d 105<\/a><\/sup> If academic historians typically toil under a\nprofessional paradigm designed for the isolated scholar, the so-called \u201cdigital\nturn\u201d and the rise of digital history have generated new collaborative energy\nthat spills across traditional research opportunities: new technologies and\nemerging paradigms are facilitating academic collaboration. And it need not\neven be institutionalized. Andrew Torget, reflecting on his early work at the\nUniversity of Virginia and arguing that \u201cdigital projects by necessity require\ncollaboration,\u201d nevertheless believed collaboration could be flexible and\ninformal. \u201cI see,\u201d he said, \u201ca movement towards collaborative teams built\naround projects and problems that will last for as long as the project or\nproblem does. You may have a home department, but you will also have\ncollaborative teams that form and dissolve over time depending on what you\u2019re\nworking on.\u201d 106<\/a><\/sup> But is collaboration enough? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A democratized\nhistory still beckons. Over two decades of work in digital history and digital\nhumanities has opened access to resources. Universities and grant-giving\ninstitutions have provided homes for practitioners. University presses are\nembracing open scholarship and professional norms have shifted accordingly. In\nthe meantime, digital humanities scholars have built proper platforms for new\nprojects: vast worlds of knowledge are within reach of any average web user.\nBuilding a textbook is as easy as signing up for WordPress. Inviting mass\ncollaboration is as easy as installing a CommentPress plug-in. Encouraging\nstudents to communicate with a text\u2014and with each other\u2014is as easy as a\none-click Hypothes.is install. A personally curated exhibit is as easy as a\nvisit to a digital humanities librarian and an installation of the Omeka\nplatform. But democratization isn\u2019t something that just happens on its own, and\ndemocracy isn\u2019t some fortunate byproduct of technological advancement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If much early work in digital history was\ngrounded in the radical democratic vision of the 1960s and 1970s, much of the\ncontemporary push for digitization of scholarship and pedagogy borrows equally\nfrom neoliberal mania for \u201cdisruption\u201d and libertarian notions of\ntechno-futurism. By spanning the rise and maturation of digital history and the\ndigital humanities, invocations of \u201cdemocratization\u201d have transcended their\noriginal context and threaten to become just another tool for digital humanists\nto carve out greater and greater academic space for their work and for\nthemselves. But such invocations have also allowed practitioners to challenge\ntraditional academic boundaries surrounding the production of distribution of\nknowledge. \u201cDemocracy\u201d is, and always has been, at root a discourse about\npower: about agency and access and equality, and \u201cdemocratization,\u201d therefore,\ncannot rely on institutions, philanthropy, or even technology alone, but must\nemerge consciously alongside critical self-reflection in the conception and\nexecution of the work that will continue to push digital history forward.<\/p>\n

  1. 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.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Ibid., 137, 145.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. The field of digital history\nspeakers in the \u201cfuture tense,\u201d argues Cameron Blevins. Cameron Blevins,\n\u201cDigital History\u2019s Perpetual Future Tense,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold\nand Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016)\nhttps:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016].\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. Philip E. Agre, \u201cSupporting the Intellectual Life of a\nDemocratic Society,\u201d Ethics and\nInformation Technology<\/em>, 3 (2001), 289. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Edward L. Ayers, \u201cThe Pasts\nand Futures of Digital History,\u201d Virginia Center for Digital History, 1999 (http:\/\/www.vcdh.virginia.edu\/PastsFutures.html)<\/a>. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. William\nG. Thomas, \u201cTrends in Digital Humanities: Remarks at the CIC Digital Humanities\nSummit,\u201d Keynote Address, CIC Digital Humanities Summit, April 19, 2012 (http:\/\/railroads.unl.edu\/blog\/?p=794)<\/a>. Cameron Blevins similarly\nargues that digital history began with \u201can overriding ideology: to democratize\naccess to the past.\u201d\nBlevins,\n\u201cDigital History\u2019s Perpetual Future Tense.\u201d [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. John Dewey, \u201cThe Need of an Industrial\nEducation in an Industrial Democracy,\u201d Manual Training and Vocational\nEducation<\/em>(February 1916), 410.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  8. See, for instance,\nJill Lepore, \u201cThe Disruption Machine What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong,\u201d\nThe New Yorker<\/em> (June 23, 2014); Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J.\nEyring, The Innovative University:\nChanging the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out<\/em> <\/em>(2011), xxii. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  9. Rosenzweig, \u201cLive Free or Die,\u201d 172. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  10. James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European\nand American Thought <\/em>(New York: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 2016). For a sampling of recent work detailing\ncontests over \u201cdemocracy,\u201d see, for instance, Manisha Sinha and Penny Von\nEschen, editors, Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American\nHistory<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Caleb McDaniel, The\nProblem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and\nTransatlantic Reform<\/em> (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013);\nand Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln<\/em>(New York: Norton, 2005).\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  11. This\npaper largely restricts itself to processes in the United States. Ideologies\nsurrounding the digital humanities, and particularly the rise of open access,\nhave different contexts outside of the U.S. The United Kingdom, for example,\nnow requires open access publishing for many recipients of state research funding.\nSee Margot Finn, \u201cPlan S and the History Journal Landscape: Royal Historical\nSociety Guidance Paper,\u201d Royal Historical Society<\/em> (October 23, 2019)\nhttps:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/royal-historical-society-publishes-guidance-paper-on-plan-s-and-history-journals\/.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  12. Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, \u201cCan\nDigital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?\u201d Journal of e-Media Studies<\/em> 3 (2013), 4.\nDOI:10.1349\/PS1.1938-6060.A.425. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  13. John Dewey, \u201cCreative Democracy: The Task Before Us,\u201d\nin John Dewey and the Promise of America<\/em>(Columbus: American Education Press, 1939). Sara Evans and Harry\nBoyte, activist-historians at the University of Minnesota, argued in the 1980s\nthat effective democratic champions must therefore create opportunities for the\npractice of democracy. \u201cDemocratic action,\u201d they argued, citing the specific\nhistorical experience of independent black churches, the Women\u2019s Christian\nTemperance Union, the Knights of Labor, and the Farmers\u2019 Alliance, \u201cdepends\nupon \u2026 free spaces, where people experience a schooling in citizenship and\nlearn a vision of the common good in the course of struggling for change.\u201d Sara\nM. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change\nin America<\/em>(New York: Harper\n& Row, 1986).\nIn light of stubborn inequality, some scholars remain far more suspicious of\ndemocracy. or at least pointed to the considerable structural obstacles to its\nachievement. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies:\nCommunicative Capitalism and Left Politics<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press,\n2009). See also Patricia Hill Collins, Black\nFeminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment<\/em>\n(New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002); Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and\nDifference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political<\/em> (Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press, 1996), Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and\nDemocracy, Oxford Political Theory <\/em>(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  14. Vernon\nLouis Parrington began his 1927 Main\nCurrents in American Thought<\/em>, often cited as the first work of American\nstudies, by stating his ambition to interrogate democracy by identifying the\n\u201cgerminal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American.\u201d Parrington, Main\nCurrents in American Thought (New York: 1927), 1. For more on Parrington, see\nJaap Verheul, \u201cThe Ideological Origins of American Studies\u201d. European\nContributions to American Studies,\u201d European\nContributions to American Studies<\/em> 40 (1999), 91-103. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  15. Michael Holzman, \u201cThe Ideological\nOrigins of American Studies at Yale,\u201d American Studies<\/em>, 40:2 (Summer\n1999), 91. Alice Kessler-Harris\u2019s 1992 American Studies\nAssociation presidential address argued that \u201cthe heart of American Studies is\nthe pursuit of what constitutes democratic culture.\u201d Alice Kessler-Harris,\n\u201cCultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em> 44 (Sept., 1992):\n299-313. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  16. We 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; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.\u201d See especially James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  17. On the other hand, the very first digital humanities project, Roberto Busa\u2019s Index Thomisticus, <\/em>depended upon the support of IBM, 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 2016,<\/em> https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016; Meredith Hindley, \u201cThe Rise of the Machines,\u201d Humanities<\/em>, Vol. 34, no. 4, (2013). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  18. Bonnie Goodman, \u201cIn Memory of Roy Rosenzweig,\u201d History News Network<\/em>(January 8, 2008), http:\/\/historynewsnetwork.org\/article\/43739. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  19. See, for instance, Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution<\/em> (New York: Doubleday, 1984). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  20. 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, accessed 7 August 2013. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  21. Randy Bass et al, Crossroads\nProject<\/em>http:\/\/crossroads.georgetown.edu\/].\nFor more on Crossroads<\/em> and its\ninnovations see John Carlos Rowe, ed. A\nConcise Companion to American Studies<\/em> (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010),\n335-336; Matthias Oppermann, American\nStudies in Dialogue: Radical Reconstructions between Curriculum and Cultural\nCritique<\/em> (Frankfurt\/New York: Campus Verlag, 2010), 167-168; and Ann\nKovalchick and Kara Dawson, eds. Education\nand Technology: An Encyclopedia<\/em> (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004),182. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  22. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, \u201cTextual Criticism and the\nText Encoding Initiative,\u201d (paper presented at the annual meeting for the\nModern Language Association, San Diego, California, December 1994). Available\nonline at: http:\/\/www.tei-c.org\/Vault\/XX\/mla94.html. See also Susan Hockey,\n\u201cThe History of Humanities Computing,\u201d in Susan Scheibman, Ray Siemens, and\nJohn Unsworth eds. Companion to Digital\nHumanities<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  23. Despite significant support from various foundations, the project\nrequires subscriptions that continue to hamper access. Only one of the two\nauthors of this piece, for instance, has access through their university to the\nexcellent database. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  24. Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, The Walt Whitman\nArchive<\/em>http:\/\/whitmanarchive.org\/.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  25. Morris Eaves et\nal, The William Blake Archive<\/em>http:\/\/www.blakearchive.org\/staticpage\/archiveataglance.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  26. Michael\nO\u2019Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cBrave New World or Blind Alley? American History\non the World Wide Web,\u201d Journal of American History<\/em>84 (June 1997), 135-155, 146. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  27. Gary J. Kornblith, \u201cVenturing into the Civil War,\nVirtually: A Review,\u201d The Journal of American History<\/em> 88 (June, 2001),\n145-151, 146. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  28. See, for instance, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New\nMedia, \u201cAbout,\u201d n.d. (http:\/\/chnm.gmu.edu\/about\/).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  29. Roy\nRosenzweig Center for History and New Media, \u201cOur Story,\u201d n.d. (http:\/\/rrchnm.org\/our-story\/history\/).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  30. Virginia Center for Digital History, \u201cAbout,\u201d n.d.,\n(http:\/\/www.vcdh.virginia.edu\/index.php?page=About). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  31. Lisa Sprio, \u201cThis Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values\nof the Digital Humanities,\u201d in Matthew K. Gold, editor, Debates in the\nDigital Humanities<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  32. Spiro also cited\n\u201ccollaboration,\u201d \u201ccollegiality and connectedness,\u201d \u201cdiversity,\u201d and \u201cexperimentation.\u201d\nSpiro, \u201cWhy We Fight.\u201d [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  33. Draxler, Bridget, et al. \u201cDemocratizing Knowledge.\u201d Humanities,\nArts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory<\/em>. <\/em>September 21,2009\n(http:\/\/hastac.org\/forums\/hastac-scholars-discussions\/democratizing-knowledge-digital-humanities).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  34. George Veletsianos\nand Royce Kimmons, \u201cAssumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship,\u201d International\nReview of Research in Open and Distance Learning<\/em> 13 (2012), 166\u201389, 167,\ncited by Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts,\nControversies, and the Future<\/em>(New\nYork: Cambridge, 2014), 3. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  35. Andrea Hunter, \u201cThe Digital Humanities and\nDemocracy,\u201d Canadian Journal of Communication<\/em> 40 (2015), 407-423.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  36. Anne Burdick et al, Digital_Humanities<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 82. https:\/\/mitpress.mit.edu\/books\/digitalhumanities. <P>[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  37. Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future<\/em>(New York: Cambridge, 2014), 16. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  38. 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). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  39. 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. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  40. For a timeline of the Public Library of Science, see https:\/\/www.plos.org\/history<\/a>.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  41. \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. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  42. David Armitage and Jo Guldi, \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. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  43. Martin Weller, The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why It Doesn\u2019t Feel Like Victory<\/em> (London: Ubiquity Press, 2014), 2. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  44. Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 7.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  45. Straumsheim, \u201cPiecing Together,\u201d n.p. [↩<\/a>]<\/span>[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  46. Amanda Patrick, \u201cThe Goizueta Foundation supports\ncreation 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. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  47. Daniel J. Cohen, \u201cFrom\nBabel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,\u201d D-Lib Magazine<\/em>\n12 (March 2006) http:\/\/www.dlib.org\/dlib\/march06\/cohen\/03cohen.html. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  48. Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 3; \u201cWhen presented with the concept of OER, most\nfaculty say that they are willing to give it a try,\u201d concluded one report. I.\nElaine Allen and Jef Seaman, Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational\nResources in U.S. Higher Education<\/em>(Wellesley,\nMA: Babson Survey Research Group, 2014), 2.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  49. Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 4. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  50. Digitalculturebooks, \u201cAbout Us,\u201d n.d. http:\/\/www.digitalculture.org\/about\/.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>

  51. Carl Straumsheim, \u201c\u2018Paying It Forward\u2019 Publishing,\u201d Inside\nHigher 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. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  52. For more on Manifold see https:\/\/manifoldapp.org\/<\/a>. For examples of\nprojects built through the platform see https:\/\/cuny.manifoldapp.org\/projects\/all<\/a>. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  53. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence\nPublishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy<\/em> (New York: NYU Press,\n2011), 174. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  54. See, for instance,\nOpen Library of Humanities, \u201cAbout,\u201d n.d.,\nhttps:\/\/www.openlibhums.org\/site\/about\/.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  55. Hunter, \u201cDigital Humanities\nand Democracy,\u201d 418. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  56. Jo\nGuldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto<\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  57. PLOS refers to their process as a\ntransparent Peer Review History. For more see https:\/\/www.plos.org\/faq#loc-Peer-review-history<\/a>. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  58. Robert Darnton, \u201cGoogle and the Future of\nBooks,\u201d The New York Review of Books<\/em>,\n(February 12, 2009). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  59. William Pannapacker,\u201cStop Calling It \u2018Digital Humanities,\u2019\u201d The Chronicle of Higher\nEducation<\/em>(February 18, 2013;\nhttp:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Stop-Calling-It-Digital\/137325\/).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  60. Thomas,\n\u201cTrends,\u201d n.p. [↩<\/a>]<\/span>[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  61. Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cLive Free Or Die?: Death, Life, Survival, And\nSobriety On The Information Superhighway,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em> 5<\/em>1, (March 1999), 161. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  62. Siva Vaidhyanathan, \u201cIntroduction: Rewiring the\n\u2018Nation\u2019: The Place of Technology in American Studies,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em>58 (September 2006), 557. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  63. Safiya Noble identifies digital\nutopianism as a neoliberal ideology and credits critical theorists with\ncomplicating triumphalist DH narratives. Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for\nIntersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138.\nBrian Greenspan, however, argues that utopian ideas are necessary for radical\nends. Brian Greenspan, \u201cAre Digital Humanists Utopian?\u201d in Debates 2016<\/em>,\nhttps:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016.\nSee also Ruth Levitas, \u201cFor Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in\nLate Capitalist Society,\u201d Critical Review\nof International Social and Political Philosophy<\/em> 3 (2000): 25\u201343; Louis\nMarin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of\nTextual Spaces<\/em> (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanities Press International, 1984); and\nFred Turner, From Counterculture to\nCyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital\nUtopianism<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  64. Mark\nSample, \u201cI\u2019m Mark, and Welcome to the Circus,\u201d HASTAC Blog, September 10, 2010\nhttp:\/\/hastac.org\/blogs\/cforster\/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  65. See, for instance, Pannapacker,\u201c\u2018Digital Humanities.\u2019\u201d [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  66. One\ncan perhaps think of HBO\u2019s satirical Silicon\nValley<\/em> and its fictional tech-billionaire Gavin Belson, who doesn\u2019t \u201cwant\nto live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better\nthan we do.\u201d [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  67. Wendy\nHui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley, \u201cThe Dark Side\nof the Digital Humanities,\u201d in Debates\n2016<\/em>,\nhttps:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  68. Daniel Allington et al, \u201cNeoliberal Tools (and\nArchives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,\u201d The L.A. Review of\nBooks<\/em>(May 1, 2016)\nhttps:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities\/.\nFor one of many rejoinders, see Juliana Spahr, Richard So, and Andrew Piper,\n“Beyond Resistance: Towards a Future History of Digital Humanities,”\nThe L.A. Review of Books<\/em>(May 11,\n2016) https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/beyond-resistance-towards-future-history-digital-humanities\/.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  69. We could here also address the MOOC frenzy, but that\nbubble has begun to pop and the passion has calmed, whether or not the\npernicious logic behind its \u201cdisruption\u201d-minded indictment of education\nremains. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  70. Stevan Harnad, \u201cOverture: A\nSubversive Proposal,\u201d in Scholarly\nJournals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing<\/em>,\ned. Shumelda Okerson and James J. O\u2019Donnell (Washington, D.C.: Association of\nResearch Libraries, 1995), 11\u201312.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  71. Martin Paul Eve, Open\nAccess and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future<\/em>(New York: Cambridge University Press,\n2014), 18; see also Peter Suber, Open Access<\/em>(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 9-15.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  72. John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The\nCase for Open Access to Research and Scholarship<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press,\n2009). As Cable Green, Creative Commons\u2019 Director of Global Learning, put it,\n\u201cWhen the marginal cost of sharing is $0, educators have an ethical obligation\nto share.\u201d Cable Green, \u201cOpen Education: The Moral, Business & Policy Case\nfor OER,\u201d Keynote Address, Affordable Learning Georgia Conference (December 11,\n2014)\nhttp:\/\/www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org\/documents\/Cable_EveningPlenaryKeynote.pdf. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  73. Matthew Gilmore, \u201cH-Net: Digital\nDiscussion for Historians,\u201d Perspectives:\nThe Newsletter of the American Historical Association<\/em>, 45 (May 2007);\nRichard Jensen, \u201cInternet\u2019s Republic of Letters: H-Net for Scholars,\u201d (1997)\nhttp:\/\/members.aol.com\/dann01\/whatis.html.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  74. Online access, of course, does not even necessarily\nguarantee greater access. See David Parry, \u201cBe Online or Be Irrelevant,\u201d\nAcademHack, January 11, 2010 http:\/\/academhack.outsidethetext.com\/home\/2010\/be-online-or-be-irrelevant\/<\/a>.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  75. Patricia Nelson\nLimerick, \u201cInsiders and Outsiders: The Borders of the USA and the Limits of the\nASA: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,\u201d American\nQuarterly<\/em> 49.3 (1997) 449-469, 453. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  76. Mintz\nand McNeil, Digital History <\/em>(http:\/\/www.digitalhistory.uh.edu\/).<\/em>)<\/a>) Textbooks should\nhave been ripe targets for the open access movement. ((Weller,\nBattle<\/em>, 76. For evidence that OER\nimproves learning outcomes, see Lane Fischer, John Hilton III, T. Jared\nRobinson, and David A. Wiley, “A multi-institutional study of the impact\nof open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students,”\nJournal of Computing in Higher Education<\/em> Vol 27 No 3 (December 2015),\n159-172. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  77. Scott\nE. Casper ed., “Textbooks Today and Tomorrow: A Conversation about\nHistory, Pedagogy, and Economic,” Journal of American History<\/em> Vol.\n100, No 4 (March 2014), 1139-1169. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  78. Rosenzweig, \u201cCan History Be Open Source?,\u201d 117-146.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  79. 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. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  80. See, for example, Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything<\/em> (New York: Penguin, 2006).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  81. Miriam Posner, \u201cWhat\u2019s Next: The Radical,\nUnrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,\u201d Debates 2016<\/em>,\nhttp:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/debates\/text\/54. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  82. Tara McPherson,\n\u201cWhy Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and\nComputation\u201d Debates <\/em>2012, http:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/debates\/text\/29.;\nBethany Nowviskie, \u201cWhat Do Girls Dig?\u201d http:\/\/nowviskie.org\/2011\/what-do-girls-dig\/.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  83. See especially Sharon M. Leon,\n\u201cComplicating a \u2018Great Man\u2019 Narrative of Digital History in the United States,\u201d\nin Bodies of Information: Intersectional\nFeminism and the Digital Humanities<\/em>, edited by Elizabeth Losh and\nJacqueline Wernimont. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  84. See also Henry Jenkins, \u201cBringing Critical Perspectives to the\nDigital Humanities: An Interview with Tara McPherson\u201d Confessions of an ACA-Fan <\/em>(March 20, 2015); David\nKim, \u201cArchives, Models, and Methods for Critical Approaches to Identities:\nRepresenting Race and Ethnicity in the Digital Humanities\u201d (PhD dissertation,\nUCLA, 2015.) [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  85. Oral historians\nJulianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn identified \u201crevolutionary\u201d and \u201cunderdog\u201d as the\nrecurring motifs in how the fields and its practitioners understood themselves:\nthe underdog and the revolutionary. Julianne\nNyhan and Andrew Flinn, Computation and\nthe Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities<\/em> (London:\nSpringer, 2016). https:\/\/www.springer.com\/gp\/book\/9783319201696<\/a>. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  86. Carol\nFadda et al, Democratizing Knowledge Project<\/em>http:\/\/democratizingknowledge.syr.edu\/index.html. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  87. \u201cPublic history\nis not only history for a large audience,\u201d Thomas Cauvin explains, \u201cbut\ninvolves public participation as well.\u201d Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2016),\n179. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  88. Laurenellen\nMcCann, \u201cBuilding Technology With, Not For Communities: An Engagement Guide for\nCivic Tech,\u201d Medium.com<\/em>, March 30,\n2015. https:\/\/medium.com\/@elle_mccann\/building-technology-with-not-for-communities-an-engagement-guide-for-civic-tech-b8880982e65a<\/a>. See also Wendy\nF. Hsu, \u201cLessons on Public Humanities from the Civic Sphere,\u201d in Debates 2016<\/em>.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  89. Anne Burdick et al, Digital_Humanities<\/em>, 93. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  90. See Sharon Leon,\n\u201cAbout,\u201d in User-Centered Digital History<\/em>,\nhttps:\/\/digitalpublichistory.org\/about<\/a>.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  91. As the\nAmerican Studies Association\u2019s Digital Humanities Caucus put it in 2016,\nAmerican studies has been \u201ca welcoming home for innovative, critical,\nboundary-pushing, justice-based, and experimental work.\u201d \u201cDH Caucus Advisory Committee Statement on AQ\u2019s Digital\nProjects Review,\u201d American Studies Association<\/em>(April 6, 2016) https:\/\/www.theasa.net\/about\/news-events\/announcements\/dh-caucus-advisory-committee-statement-aq%E2%80%99s-digital-projects-review.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  92. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project<\/em> http:\/\/www.antievictionmap.com\/. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  93. Miriam\nPosner, \u201cSome things to think about before you exhort everyone to code,\u201d Miriam Posner\u2019s Blog: Digital Humanities,\nData, 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\nlikewise has identified the push to get black girls to code as \u201can\nindividualized, privatized approach to thinking about Black women\u2019s\nempowerment, in neoliberal fashion.\u201d Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for\nIntersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  94. Elizabeth\nLosh and Jacqueline Wernimont, eds., Bodies\nof Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities<\/em>\n(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xvii. For the relationship\nof DH\u2019s digital tools and broader values, see Natalia Cecire, \u201cIntroduction:\nTheory 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,\n\u201cOn Building.\u201d Stephen Ramsay Blog<\/em>,\nJanuary 11, 2011. http:\/\/stephenramsay.us\/text\/2011\/01\/11\/on-building\/<\/a>; and Tom\nScheinfeldt, \u201c\u201cWhere\u2019s the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer\nQuestions?\u201d In Debates 2012<\/em>), http:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/debates\/text\/18<\/a>.; and Roopika\nRisam, \u201cNavigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black\nFeminism,\u201d Debates 2016<\/em>,; Siva\nVaidhyanathan, \u201cAfterword: Critical Information Studies,\u201d Cultural Studies<\/em> Volume 20, No 2-3 (2006), 292-315. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  95. Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cToward a Critical\nBlack Digital Humanities,\u201d in Debates\n2019<\/em>. See also Noble, \u201cA Future for Intersectional Black Feminist\nTechnology Studies,\u201d Scholar &\nFeminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  96. Kim Gallon,\n\u201cMaking a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,\u201d in Debates 2016,<\/em>\nhttps:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  97. Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Micha C\u00e1rdenas,\nJacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee, \u201cQueerOS: A User\u2019s\nManual,\u201d in Debates 2016,<\/em>\nhttps:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016.  [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  98. See,\nfor instance. Jessie Daniels, \u201cRace and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review\nand Critique,\u201d New Media and Society<\/em>\n15, no. 5 (2012): 695\u2013719. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  99. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes:\nRace, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2002). Legal scholar\nJerry Kang was among the earliest to consider how race and representation\nfunction on the web. Jerry Kang, \u201cCyber-Race,\u201d Harvard Law Review<\/em> 113, no. 5 (2002): 1130\u20131208. See also Jessica\nMarie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, \u201cIntroduction: Wild Seed in the Machine,\u201d The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies\nand Research<\/em> Vol 47, No 3 (2017).\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  100. See, for instance,\nMoya Z. Bailey, \u201cAll the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men,\nbut Some of Us Are Brave,\u201d Journal Of\nDigital Humanities<\/em> (Winter 2011); and Tara McPherson, \u201cWhy Are the Digital\nHumanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation,\u201d in Debates 2012<\/em>. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  101. Janet Abbate\nchronicled how the representation of coding evolved from a feminine activity in\nthe mid-twentieth century to a masculine one at the dawn of the twenty-first. Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women\u2019s Changing\nParticipation in Computing<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). For gender and DH,\nsee also Donna Haraway, \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist\nFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,\u201d in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature<\/em> (New York; Routledge,\n1991); Deb Verhoeven, \u201cHas Anyone Seen a Woman?\u201d Alliance of Digital Humanities\nOrganizations Speech, (2015), debverhoeven.com\/anyone-seen-a-woman. On\nintersectionality, see especially Roopika Risam, \u201cBeyond the Margins:\nIntersectionality and the Digital Humanities,\u201d Digital Humanities Quarterly <\/em>9 (2015); and Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, editors,\nThe Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online<\/em> (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  102. Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for\nIntersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138.\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  103. \u201cWilliam G. Thomas\nIII, and Elizabeth Lorang. \u201cThe Other End of the Scale: Rethinking the Digital\nExperience in Higher Education,\u201d Educause\nReview<\/em> (September 15, 2014).\n[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  104. Amy E. Earhart and\nToniesha L. Taylor, \u201cPedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of\nFerguson,\u201d in Debates 2016<\/em>,\nhttps:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016.  [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  105. Anthony\nGrafton,\u201cLoneliness and\nFreedom,\u201d Perspectives: The Newsletter of\nthe American Historical Association<\/em>, 49 (March 2011)\nhttps:\/\/www.historians.org\/publications-and-directories\/perspectives-on-history\/march-2011\/loneliness-and-freedom. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  106. Scott Nesbit et al, \u201cA Conversation with\nDigital Historians,\u201d Southern Spaces<\/em>(January 31, 2012)\nhttps:\/\/southernspaces.org\/2012\/conversation-digital-historians. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    *Note: The period for public comment on the initial manuscript ended April 10, 2020. The revised manuscript is now open for comments.* History Can Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History In 2006, Roy Rosenzweig published an article in the Journal of American History entitled \u201cCan History Be Open Source? Wikipedia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-38","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38","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=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38\/revisions\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}