One Amongst Many

Community, n

“A body of people or things viewed collectively.”

We are a Community

Studying the concept of communities has long been approached in academic fields as one that is inherently difficult. On the one hand, looking at communities from a purely unbiased scholarly perspective removes the emotional connection individuals have to certain groups - but on the other hand, emotional responses are inherently biased. The truth is, we cannot remove ourselves from the community because we are a part of it, so critically we have to look from an inside out.

The digital world has further complicated this idea of community - moving it beyond physical spaces into the online world. As a result, people are part of a community based in geographies related to where they live, go to school, and work but they are also able to connect with people across the globe who share similar values and interests. The digital world thus allows for the enhancement of physical communities through online sectors, but also creates the possibility for the creation of new communities that do not have physical ties.

This creation of online communities has allowed for intellectual spaces to be maintained through common interest in a subject. In the Humanities much academic work is done alone, with long hours spent researching for the production of a single-authored text. By contrast, online scholarship is often defined by collaboration and open-access work. Yet, there is a certain level of prestige that controls academia and certain forms of knowledge and knowledge making are valued above other, maintaining the hierarcies embedded in scholarship.

Crowd, n.3

“A large number of persons gathered so closely together as to press upon or impede each other; a throng, a dense multitude.”

The Crowd in Digital Humanities:

The concept of the crowd too moves into the digital world, creating an online gathering of people on certain websites and interfaces. Labour is moving online and many people are working jobs with long hours and little financial benefit making workers invisible and often easily exploited. Yet, digital crowdsourced labour like any kind of labour, is not only done for economic means but is also done purely for the enjoyment. Some types of digital work can be agreed to be given away for free and yet too much is taken for free because of unethical practices that exploit online labourers. Tebor Scholz points out that a direct line can be drawn between “traditional sweatshop economies” and those embedded on the internet. The online labour industry is thus an extension of the physical labour industry, showing that while the space being used is not the same but the practices are. There is a culture in which workers are paid inadequately, paid in a wage that is non-monetary, or not paid at all.

As with other sections of the work force, academic work is being done online as well. The issue though is that much intellectual work is being removed from the public eye in favour of journals that people must pay to access. This is limiting scholarly engagement with the public and imposing further hierarchies. While many believe that digital work may allow for more access to academic discourse there is less work being done in these spaces than many believe. The traditional gatedness of academic communities is embedded in these practices.

Links

• Draxler, Bridget and Jon Winet. ‘Community’ Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
• Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”
• Tebor Scholz, ‘Crowdmilking’ 2014
• Tim Causer and Valerie Wallace. 2012. “Building a volunteer community: results and findings from Transcribe Bentham,” DHQ 6.2 .
• Avi Santo and Christopher Lucas, 2009. ‘Engaging Academic and Nonacademic Communities through Online Scholarly Work.”
• Any piece in part 2, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds(ourcing)’, in Writing History in the Digital Age, Kristen Nawrotzki; Jack Dougherty eds. 2013. DigitalCultureBooks, Ann Arbor.

See my annotations here.