Kathleen Fitzpatrick
““...some of the most important work that we can do as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curatorial practices, bringing together, highlighting and remixing significant ideas in existing texts than remaining solely focused on the production of more ostensibly original texts.”
The video of Kathleen Fitzpatrick that was shown in class piqued my interest and made it easy for me to properly digest planned obsolescence, thereby increasing my interest in Kathleen herself. The focus of this blog post would be Kathleen and a little bit of her impact in the digital humanities world.
Biography
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is a scholar in the fields of Digital Humanities, and Media Studies. She is currently the Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern language Association, and a visiting member in the English department at New York University. Her graduate work concentrated in American fiction and media studies. She has written, "The Anxiety of Obsolescence"- which surrounds the demise of literature. And "Planned Obsolescence" because she was, “left with the detritus of many smaller ideas that demanded a kind of immediacy, and yet seemed destined to fade into nothingness,” as was written in the introduction (Planned 7). She started aa blog called Planned Obsolescence right after her first book, and the success she got from there led to her next book. She participated in the founding of the online collaborative called MediaCommons. One of the reasons for writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence was to find out the kind of dangers the novel felt threatened by.
Digital Humanities
In an interview she had with Fred Rowland, she said that Digital Humanities has to do with the job that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. To her, it happens in two ways. On one hand, it deals with ways to bring the tools of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. On the other hand, it's bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. She believes that digital media and the internet are huge tools in getting to a wider range of audience other than the academy. This way, scholarly works would be shared to a wider range of audience, and this encourages participation. She, as well as other digital humanists, are working towards influencing the publishing environment more open to other alternate venues of publicizing their work, such as blogs and podcasts. This is important as it provokes fast responses from the audience, and also show the scholar's work in progress- this allows for people to see the building process of a novel. As a Director at the Modern Language Association, it goes without saying that Kathleen is of a huge influence in the formation of the MLA style kind of writing which is adopted by Humanities students, and scholars. This style encourages proper documentation of cited works which allows for credit to be given to the appropriate source in order to avoid plagiarism. This is quite interesting as the goal of Digital Humanities is to encourage collaboration, yet it allows for the allocation of "authorship" to the right sources.
The idea of the MLA Commons is to introduce new forms of publishing, as well as allow for people to have an impact in the process of publishing.
In a post she wrote for Chronicles of Higher Education's ProfHacker's blog, Kathleen defines Digital Humanities as: "a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, who ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies."
Kathleen's book, "Planned Obsolescence" is a perfect example of this new kind of publishing as she made provision for a peer to peer review through an interactive section where people could give critical reviews on each paragraph of the book. The book can be considered as a challenge to think broadly about the academy's future, and a solicitation to reconsider that future in more general terms.
The passion at which Kathleen talks about the idea of a new kind of publishing made me wonder why she chose "Planned obsolescence" as the title of her book, so I decided to check for the meaning of planned obsolescence, and Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as: "the practice of making or designing something (such as a car) in such a way that it will only be usable for a short time so that people will have to buy another one."
Whereas, the purpose of publishing should be so that it can be in use for a long period of time, and it can be built upon. Like the quote by Kathleen in the first part of this post, books should be built on ideas that can spring up more, while at the same time allowing for new discoveries to be made in the academic field. A lot of her argument is based on creativity in academia, the ability to express one's self through various methods be it through books or through the digital field. When asked if she could get creative for her dissertation by a PHD student, Kathleen replied that she should take the risk. The ability to provide good groundwork for a project is one of the basis for her arguments. The challenge here, however, is that the professors of the students have to think of innovative ways to access the new way of thinking as there is no written down standards that are in place. In order to take such risks, much research has to be done concerning the society as to whether they prefer the traditional methods, or are open to new ideas. While upholding the established rigor of scholarship is important, it is necessary to push the boundaries and allow for new ways to present "scholarship".
The field of Digital Humanities relies on a lot of social media works especially Twitter. Kathleen however believes that the most problems faced by digital humanists are more socially-inclined, rather than technological. She believes that the problem is more in getting people to participate in a collaborative project in order to maintain sustainability is more problematic than getting the work done. Another problem which has been identified by her is the economic aspect. She points out in her book, Planned Obsolescence, that financial sustainability is near impossible. And in an attempt to find a solution to this problem, she suggests that "open-access" publishing is more affordable than the "traditional, mainstream" publishing. She calls for partnerships and collaboration between the different units in the university.
Kathleen says that it is not enough that a scholar gets an idea of an article or a book, it has to be open to the criticism of other writers before it is published, but should be distinguished from the works of other authors. She argues this because new ideas are born from the previous works of others, and if an author claims the ideas for him/herself, then it can be exposed by various forms of digital technologies such as blogs, hypertexts, links, etc. This new form of publishing allows for a multi-faced kind of writing which makes it possible for images to be properly utilized in a text. In her argument, she says, " “we need to think less about completed products and more about text in process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix; less about ownership and more about sharing.” This idea posed by Kathleen seem to eliminate the individual author but rather encourage a more collective one. She responds to this by saying, "the collective should not be seen as the elimination of individual, but rather as … a fertile community composed of multiple intelligence, each of which is always working in relationship with others.” (Fitzpatrick).
As much as the media are a source of information to people, the novel should not be totally taken off the table as it encourages more stimulation. In my opinion, reading from a novel is a lot more insightful, as it makes it easy for the reader to connect more with the author.