it might be interesting to put forth some positions here on a variety of topics. we have by my reckoning within the last year in various places some assertions that internet studies or internet research is: a discipline an interdiscipline a transdiscipline a postdiscipline (warning sts rant ensues) i'm pretty sure it is some of the last 3, primarily because of certain overlaps, but i a certain that it isn't the first, but i'm hoping it never becomes that centralized. so what are these categories, if anything,...? well it very much depends on your own personal context. for me, they are primarily terms of analysis, i look at say the disciplinisation of the social sciences, communication studies and other 'special sciences' within a historic framework that depends very much on a highly contingent set of historical facts, such as the reaffirmation of social science post wwiii, etc. etc. etc. you can't have a discipline for me without this set of historical contexts, but what has to happen for a discipline to really occur is the decontextualization, the dehistorization of the research in the field at a certain level, a transformation of the field from a subject of study to an object of study, and with that objectification, you usually have a tendency for the rise of predominant methodologies or minimally a set of methods that are accepted as 'scientific', even if they only are manifestations of the fetish of objective science, or scientism. now, for me, what this means is that as internet studies advances, while there will be a tendency to say unify in one sense the tendency to pluralize should help us overcome this, i think this is in part due to the transdisciplinary subject, which in the guattarian sense has a globality that transcends disciplines, making any method or approach meager before it, except as a way of adding to the body of knowledge, as an interdiscipline, which we also surely are, we are a whole that is greater than the parts, each person bringing their own disciplinary perspective to the knowledge game, and as a post discipline, well. that is all there really is in the profit driven academia of the future perhaps, and i think there are tendencies to put our research to such applications. nonetheless, as the peripheries become the core in things like internet studies, i prefer to follow the mantra of plurality, interdisciplinarity, within a deeply contextual understanding of the histories and technologies involved, including their inherent subjectivity in relation to us, for many of us aren't only researching the internet through our actions we are actively creating it on many different levels now it is bedtime, rant time is over;) jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

ditto to these bits from Danny and Matt... (and adding my mumbled comments (that you wont hear this morning) to the comment about cultural studies and feminist theory labels (for both women and men) becoming cultural capital in some "interdisciplines" even as they actually serve to silence so-called marginalized voices by re-asserting a "chic"ness of their own...) ethics of inter/trans/disciplinarity sounds pretty good - but who will lay down the Law on this one? r At 07:34 PM 11/6/2002 +1300, you wrote:

but I get the feeling sometimes that the racial and feminist critiques of disciplinary exclusion have been heavily appropriated by people with a lot of socio-economic privilege to extend by avoiding issues of accountability to disciplines, cultures and socio-economic locations. Growing fields (though it would be interesting to hear from those in "named" programmes such as "Internet Studies" about how their enrolments are doing after the crash lol) tend to produce Pollyanna-ish discourses that gloss over these issues. Freed from the weighty constraints of disciplinary history, how many of us haven't enjoyed some sense of frisson at being in the middle of something new, exciting and developing? This is probably why so much new media discourse (particularly in the U.S.) takes place in Traweek's "culture of no culture", where ideas circulate with little reflexive positioning or critique. As Dilbert put it during the boom, "Hey, I go to work, I get paid a million bucks. What's not to like?".

So I guess I'm interested in an ethics of interdisciplinarity - from which traditions do we draw from for our ethical frameworks, when these are no longer given? By this I don't mean the work on "researching online human subjects" which Charles Ess and co. have covered admirably. I guess I'm asking about an "ethics of being interdisciplinary". So I suppose this is more of a philosophical question (well outside my expertise:). And I was sure this post started out about institutional strategy! Anyway, any leads?

Regards,

Danny

Matthew Allen wrote on 6/11/02 2:06 PM:

...

the boundaries or terrain which they enclose. I would assert that the difficulty for transdisciplinary scholars, such as found in areas of study such as Internet Studies, is not in traversing the ground, nor crossing the borders, of the many disciplines which they might encounter; rather, the difficulty is one of connection with and deep understanding of processes.

-- http://www.dannybutt.net

_______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l

Radhika Gajjala _______________________ http://www.cyberdiva.org

sounds good. r At 12:36 PM 11/6/2002 -0600, you wrote:

Finally, if such an ethics were to have these characteristics, they would not look entirely like the Law (e.g., as brought down from on high, carved in stone, by a single prophet who enjoyed exclusive access to the Absolute) but more like an emergent _ethos_, a description and prescription of what our best habits (ethos), our best practices might be under the current circumstances. (This may be part of radhika's point?) They would be the work of a collective dialogue - one marked by sometimes passionate but respectful debate over important differences. They would be the result of a lot of hard work - but also a lot of fun.

In sum, I'd encourage aoir-ists to jump in and start articulating!

Radhika Gajjala _______________________ http://www.cyberdiva.org

At 7:27 AM -0500 11/7/02, radhika gajjala wrote:

This discussion on disciplinarity has been very interesting so far, and I just know its going to feed into a small presentation I have to give here at my university tomorrow (entitled "tips on publishing" - what do *I* know about that - but if they dont mind hearing me, of course I'll talk;-)) . So thanks all (I'll make sure to acknowledge "the list").

The problem of inter/cross/trans disciplinarity - when this issue becomes a battlefield - in the case of promotion, tenure, getting a phd etc in the US (so I am being very US centric and self-centric here) is accentuated in relation to publishing.... where you publish etc - and some publications in some disciplines dont allow the saying and asking of certain types of questions and critiques (again I'm simplifying and being extremely polite...) - which is why of course those of us who do more than token feminist and cultural studies type work (however much I may mumble and grumble about some kinds of appropriation of these - these are still some of the only academic spaces that even allow certain kinds of conversations) sometimes have an interesting time in relation definitions of disciplinarity.

Now with "Internet studies" being "interdisciplinary" however - I find less resistance (again depending on the kind of *questions* one asks in relation to the Internet...this resistance is less or more) - perhaps because the Internet "sells" (in relation to the corporate world, I mean) better than critiques coming from various counter-mainstream locations?

So when we talk about ethics of inter/trans/cross etc disciplinarity in relation to Internet studies - what are we selling?

I'm going to quickly respond to this with two articles from the same issue of today's Chronicle of Higher Education email digest (hopefully this won't make this email too long!) that well illuminate, I think, the complex issues that Radhika brings up, and that have been discuss in relation to disciplinarity. The issues therein are rather western, if not only US centric, but the consequences that publication, disciplinarity, legitimation, hegemony, etc., have, must be considered both at an institutional level, which is the one at which I think they have largely been discussed on air-l, and at the individual level, and that is why I find these two articles of interest. Thanks, Sj ----------

The Chronicle of Higher Education Thursday, November 7, 2002

http://chronicle.com/free/2002/11/2002110701t.htm

Scholarly Publishers Aim to Woo Librarians Away From Self-Published Research By SCOTT CARLSON

A group of scholarly publishers will begin a public-relations campaign this month that is intended to improve publishers' image among librarians and academics. The campaign aims, in part, to quash a newfound enthusiasm among some librarians for self-publishing research results online, a practice that lets scholars bypass academic journals that many researchers say are too slow and too costly.

Supporters of the campaign also say that it will be an attempt to mend relations with librarians and academics. "The long-term goal is to re-establish that we are allies with the academic world," says Lynn Rienner, the founder of the social-sciences publishing company Lynn Rienner Publishers, who has helped shape the campaign.

She says relations between librarians and publishers have been portrayed as "adversarial" and as "warring camps" in the press, a characterization that hurts her. "It was because of librarians that I got into publishing," she says.

The campaign is sponsored by the scholarly-publishing division of the Association of American Publishers and will be run by Edelman, a giant public-relations firm based in Chicago and New York. The publishers and the firm are still working out details of the campaign, but mailings, advertisements, summits between librarians and publishers, and speakers at conferences have all been proposed.

"It's something that we'll have to keep at for years," says Ted Nardin, vice president of the scientific and technical division of McGraw-Hill, a leading publisher. "It's not just a six-month program."

Beyond smoothing ruffled feathers, the publishers seek to reach academics and librarians who advocate distributing research results on the Internet. Marc H. Brodsky, the executive director and chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes several prominent journals, says the campaign will emphasize the perks that working with traditional publishers brings: money for marketing, the prestige of a well-known journal, the expertise and mediation of an editor, and the management of peer review.

"There is an illusion that electronic publishing is cheap," Mr. Brodsky says. "There are ways of putting things on the Web that are cheap, but not ways that give the value that publishers provide."

However, the campaign will not focus on the sharply rising cost of journal subscriptions -- one of the main rubs between publishers, on the one hand, and academics and librarians, on the other. "I really don't see it as the key issue," says Mr. Nardin, of McGraw-Hill. "My view of this program is that our objective is not to convey pricing but to convey what publishers are doing."

But Kenneth Frazier, director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that rising journal costs have been the driving force behind Internet-based alternative-publishing efforts. "The problem is that a lot of commercial publishers are not only addicted to profits -- they are addicted to high revenue growth, too," he says. "That creates a situation that is sure to motivate alternative systems for disseminating knowledge."

Journal-subscription rates have gone up an average of 8.5 percent per year since 1986, while library budgets have risen 5.6 percent per year, according to ARL Statistics, a publication of the Association of Research Libraries.

"The notion of doing some work of repairing the relationship between publishers and librarians is not a bad idea," adds Mr. Frazier, who founded the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC, which supports alternative-publishing strategies. But "if we're going to disseminate knowledge, we're going to have to have a more affordable model of scholarly communication. That is the big question that I would want to raise."

Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

----------

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Career Network Thursday, November 7, 2002 A Look at the Record http://chronicle.com/jobs/2002/11/2002110701c.htm

By DENNIS BARON

First Person

Personal experiences on the job market

Previous articles

Allison Porchnik's tenure and promotion case was typical rather than ideal. It illustrates how tenure happens -- or sometimes doesn't happen -- at my institution. Although her tenure case probably kept her up nights for a year, and it gave me some unquiet moments along the way, I won't keep you in suspense: In the end, she was successful.

In my first installment of this series on the tenure-and-promotion process, I offered my own subjective observations and interpretations of how promotions work in my shop. And I promised to introduce you to some "typical" promotion candidates and follow their cases through the system. That brings us to the case of Allison Porchnik, which is, of course, not her real name.

The tenure process began for Porchnik before we hired her: She used her job interview to show us that she had already produced outstanding scholarship and was already a highly effective instructor. Keeping the bar high from the start means there is less chance of a negative tenure vote six years later.

Once she was hired, annual reviews kept the department informed of Porchnik's developing record of scholarship, teaching, and service. After one review I advised her to stop reviewing books: It takes time away from "real" work, and besides, why make enemies so early in a career? A year later I told her not to volunteer for so many committees. She complied and kept her research program on schedule. Other assistant professors seem less able to budget their time. One told a previous department head that there weren't enough hours in the day for him to teach and to do research. The head told him, "Sleep less." It wasn't long before both of them took other jobs.

I met with Porchnik in the spring of her fifth year to discuss her promotion. This is the tenure profile that she brought to that meeting, together with some comments on that record.

Research

Porchnik's book, accepted by a strong university press, was being copy-edited and would be in print by October, when the department makes its tenure decisions. The book was crucial to the promotion. If Porchnik had finished her manuscript six months sooner, we would have been able to send reviewers the actual published book instead of page proofs. Reviewers who receive a physical book discuss its strengths and shortcomings, evaluating it in the context of recent work being done in the field. But if I send them proofs, or worse yet, a manuscript, some reviewers treat the work as still "in progress," asking for revisions of whole sections or wondering aloud if the author should take an entirely different approach. Such advice may be on target, but it's too late to do the tenure candidate any good.

I have seen assistant professors with weaker records than Porchnik's, and some with stronger ones. Alvy Singer brought to his fifth-year review a publisher's contract for a manuscript only half done. On his vita, he listed the book as "forthcoming." I had to tell him that college promotion committees want the book in production before they'll believe that it is "forthcoming." Forget about the advance contract, I told Singer, write the book.

My discussion with another assistant professor, Carol Lipton, after her third-year review took a different tack: Because her book had been published to rave reviews and she was getting invitations to apply for other jobs, I told her that the department wanted to consider her for early promotion.

In Porchnik's case, her vita showed four articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, in addition to the book. One of the articles was a dissertation chapter that later found its way into her book. It wouldn't do much to enhance her record. Another appeared in the top journal in her field. It's becoming more and more important to crack the top-tier journals. The third presented material from Porchnik's next major research project, offering evidence that she would continue to be a productive scholar. And the fourth had been solicited by an editor for a special issue, a sign that Porchnik was emerging as a presence on the national scene.

Porchnik had also published two book chapters. Book chapters will do less for a tenure case, since promotion committees generally assume that essay collections receive less scrutiny from peer reviewers than journal articles. One of Porchnik's chapters appeared in a collection edited by a friend at another university. It would be treated with suspicion. The other one -- solicited by the editor after he heard Porchnik at a conference -- demonstrates her competence, not her connections, and would at least be received neutrally.

I have found that this is not a message assistant professors want to hear. To them, a publication is a publication, so what's the problem?

But in preparing tenure papers for the college and campuswide tenure committees, I have to comment on the prestige of the journals and the presses where the candidate publishes, and the rigor with which submissions are reviewed. I'm routinely asked, "How good is this journal?" or "What's their rejection rate?" Of course a publication in a "friendly" source -- a chapter in a book edited by the candidate or a friend, for example -- can be groundbreaking, but it must first prove itself in the marketplace of ideas.

I recall a tenure candidate who published just such a chapter, in a book that he edited himself. Although he was promoted on the basis of other work, he remained miffed that promotion committees discounted that book chapter as self-publication. As it turned out, the work was widely cited by other scholars, and quickly became a minor classic in the field.

I also recall a book chapter by another candidate that had less success. A sound piece of work from all accounts, it never saw the light of day. The collection it was to appear in, edited by the candidate's former partner, was shopped in vain from press to press and eventually dropped from the faculty member's vita.

Porchnik's vita listed four papers presented at professional conferences, and one lecture at another university. Lecturing and conference presentations offer positive evidence of professional energy and engagement beyond the department and the campus. One science department I know of requires its fifth-year assistant professors to go on a lecture tour, which the department organizes and pays for. This increases the chances of getting external tenure reviewers already familiar with the candidate's work.

Unfortunately, most English departments can't underwrite that kind of professional exposure. Porchnik also guest-lectured in a class at Illinois, and helped to organize a local conference. However, local work, which typically undergoes less rigorous evaluation, does not count as scholarship for the purposes of a promotion bid. I advised Porchnik to move these two items from the research section of her vita to the teaching and service sections.

Teaching

Students regularly placed Porchnik on the university's list of instructors rated excellent by their students, and members of the department who had observed her classes were uniformly impressed with her teaching. She served on several dissertation committees. Teaching was clearly not a problem. While many students found her demanding, she was also supportive, and she motivated students to do their best work in her classes.

By contrast, another tenure candidate -- let's call her Professor Mellish -- was also a demanding teacher, but appealed only to the top students in her classes. Her student ratings were low, and while her peer observers commented favorably on the high standards she set, they expressed concern over Mellish's unwillingness to address the needs of the other two-thirds of the class. When I tried to discuss this with Mellish, she proved intractable. She let me know that she operated on a high intellectual level because students needed it, and she had no sympathy for students who couldn't keep up. Mellish's scholarship was unassailable, but though she did manage to bring her student scores up to the average range, her tenure case almost foundered on the teaching record.

At one time, weak teaching got by with little more than a hiccup. A science department once presented to the college promotion committee a tenure candidate -- a big grant-getter and active publisher -- who regularly garnered the lowest possible teaching scores. The department head explained, "He's teaching a required course; we all get lousy scores in that course." When I asked him if it was also possible that his department could place more emphasis on effective undergraduate teaching, he said, "Well yes, that too."

Research universities like mine have a reputation for not valuing teaching, and for expecting humanities faculty members to teach better than their counterparts in science and math. Illinois has done a lot in recent years to reverse that situation by offering pedagogical mentoring. Our goal is to hire a faculty of cutting-edge researchers in all fields who are also first-class teachers, and the fact that promotion committees now scrutinize teaching assessments conveys this important message to the entire faculty, not just the new kids.

Service

Porchnik served on the department's graduate admissions committee and was an elected representative to the department's advisory committee. She helped out with a faculty search and was a member of the committee on women in the profession for one of the professional societies she belonged to.

My department tries to protect junior faculty members from heavy committee loads so that they can establish their research programs and become confident instructors. But we must also foster a sense of departmental citizenship so that when faculty members are promoted they willingly take on their share of service, and professional visibility will foster the development of a national reputation for the scholar.

Porchnik's service is very satisfactory, but other departments in the college assign junior scholars significantly more committee work, and that means I routinely have to explain why our promotion candidates present such a "thin" service record.

After going over her vita at our spring pretenure meeting, I shifted to the nuts and bolts of promotion. I would need from Porchnik the names of five external reviewers, all of them full professors at peer or better institutions. Senior department members also provide a list. I would then secure two reviewers from Porchnik's list and three from the department list.

Finding external reviewers is no easy task. Even though I start earlier each year, I still get told, "I've already taken on as many reviews as I can handle." One person I asked to review Porchnik told me, "I can't do this because my life is falling apart right now." Tenure candidates may find it reassuring that even full professors at peer institutions are living on the edge. Although I almost blurted out a ghoulish, "Tell me more," because inquiring minds do want to know, I muttered an apology and moved on to the next person on my list.

The external reviewers read and reported on the tenure materials that Porchnik helped prepare: a vita, copies of her publications, and a three-page statement about her scholarship, divided evenly between accomplishments to date and the next research project. Porchnik also prepared a three-page statement of her teaching philosophy. We sent the materials to external reviewers by mid-June, asking them to report by September 30. All of Porchnik's reviewers reported on time, and in my next column I'll describe the kinds of things reviewers said in their letters on Porchnik, as well as on some other cases, and how tenure committees read those letters.

Dennis Baron is chairman of the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He will write a regular column this academic year on the tenure process. The names of faculty members mentioned here have been changed. Readers may recognize some of the names, but that would be because they, like the author, have an affinity for Woody Allen movies.

Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

those articles are certainly useful and timely. but a clarification in relation to all the stuff I've been saying about inter...etc.. disciplinarity - the problem is not "peer reviewing" of research (again who *counts* as a "peer") but the fact that some journals emphasized as top tier within certain disciplines dont even allow the insertion of certain kinds of questions (thus while claiming that their process is "objective" it is very political ) - so people who tend to do ask these questions find other - peer reviewed - publication venues but get named as "interdisciplinary" in a negative manner ... (just for the record, though, I personally havent faced major problems in this regard - I just try and find publishing venues that allow my questions and this has not so far been a major issue - but that may be because of reasons other than issues of "disciplinarity" as a problem for tenure and promotion - or maybe I am speaking too soon!)