For those who have been wondering about the lack of new posts on this blog: it has been a busy time, and I have been blogging ‘behind the scenes.’ Since I use this blog as a repository for my research data, I’ve been drafting a number of posts as I do my research that I haven’t yet published. I hope over the holidays to have ready at least my post on a series of essays by Donald M. Scott on American lecturing in the 19th century.
I was encouraged in my rationale for using this blog as a repository for my research data on performative speaking by an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus news digest. The interview (“Bringing Tenure into the Digital Age,” December 10, 2008) is with Christine L. Borgman, Professor of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, and author of Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007). Here’s the book’s amazon.com url.
Here’s the most relevant exchange:
Q. In your recent book, “Scholarship in the Digital Age,” you contend that the tenure system needs to reward people for contributions to collaborative digital projects instead of recognizing only those who publish books and articles. Why?
A. Data is becoming a first-class object. In the days of completely paper publication, the article or book was the end of the line. And once the book was in libraries, the data were often thrown away or allowed to deteriorate.
Now we’re in a massive shift. Data become resources. They are no longer just a byproduct of research. And that changes the nature of publishing, how we think about what we do, and how we educate our graduate students. The accumulation of that data should be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.
Exactly!
