In these ventures to digitize our cultural heritage, “Google Books” brought a whole new—a totalizing—approach. Because this initiative aspires to a vast and integrated depository of our print materials, that approach is inspiring. But it is also disturbing and fraught with danger, perhaps especially in the United States, where the Library of Congress represents a national commitment to free culture and access to knowledge. The Google Books Settlement controversy exposes the disconnect between commercially driven digital initiatives and the scholarly communities whose educational mission is to preserve, access, and augment our cultural heritage. About this matter I shall have more to say in a moment.
For a scholar and educator, a most dismaying aspect of this general situation is the blow-back effect one sees in graduate programs. Dissertation work in literary and cultural studies, for example, is now regularly shaped to short-term market demands, which respond to a calendar that has little relation to the fundamental needs of humanities research and scholarship. Important work is not being done, is positively shunned, in graduate programs because academic presses will almost certainly not publish it any more. At the same time, as opportunities emerge for using digital resources to improve scholarly work in the humanities, programmatic responses in traditional departments have been minimal to nonexistent. Humanities students who want to pursue digital work almost always do so outside their regular institutional programs, which remain firmly oriented to print publication.
For two decades various persons and concerned institutions have been trying to address those problems. Electronic journals and journal providers; various types of digital repositories maintained by universities and their libraries; Google Books and Google Scholar; large commercial databases like ECCO; scholar-driven and peer-reviewed research ventures like NINES; and most recently print-on demand publishing: all are responses to a crisis in scholarly communication. Taken individually, each of these ventures—even Google Books, if we except the current Settlement proposals—is important, useful, sometimes inspiriting. Moreover, taken together they appear to signal a great improvement in the scholar’s and educator’s condition.
But two problems pervade these responses. First, their hodgepodge character is darkly eloquent, signaling a grave and now widely registered instability in humanities research education. Second, and far more troubling, the community of scholars has played only a minor role in shaping these events. We have been like marginal, third-world presences in these momentous changes—agents who have actually chosen an adjunct and subaltern position.
Let’s pause to reflect on the inaction of the scholarly community. What’s going on here? Rather ask: who? The emergence of digital technology has brought a new and crucial populace into the university. So far as the university’s political and social structure is concerned, they are employees hired to serve the faculties. I leave aside the fact that these people are often scholars of distinction in their own right. What is chiefly pertinent here is (1) their skills are essential to digital humanities work; (2) the structure of the institution separates them from the regular faculties; and (3) they are an expensive population to support, commanding high salaries, often higher than the faculty persons they might be working with, as well as expensive resources that regular faculty don’t need and wouldn’t know how to use anyhow.