Faculty

I hate my hair. Really. It refuses to behave. I try brushing it into submission, but it refuses, springing out from its confinement in hair band and bobby pins. I hate my roommate more. Why is she sick? Now I have to go interview Dr. Christian Black for the school paper and I am too nervous and scared of him to even begin to make sense.

Everyone knows about Dr. Black. He is the youngest Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, graduating at 24 with distinction. Now at 29 he’s at the top of his game, an endowed professor teaching social theory here at Anonymous U. And he’s rich, too. They say he has his own private helicopter pad on the top of his penthouse apartment.

Who am I to interview him? Sure my name, Anastasia Irons, makes me sound like a princess, but I’m just the daughter of a lumberjack and a secretary. It’s crazy that I even got into AnonU and even crazier that I majored in Social Theory.

I mean, Social Theory is for intellectuals. People who have time to sit around and think deeply about the sort of post-Marxian reimaging of capital done by the likes of Pierre Bourdieu. I’m just a poor girl from the backwoods who works at the local hardware store and is too skinny to be anything but a guy’s best friend.

Speaking of best friends, mine is José, who is poor, too. And not white. That’s not important, but I’m not going to marry him, even though he’d like to marry me and our fathers are best friends. But as Bourdieu says, class classifies and it classifies the classifier and my racial and social capital just hasn’t given me a “taste” (in the Bourdieuean sense) for a poor Latino. I’m going to marry a prince, someone rich and white who will sweep me off my feet.

Just kidding. Of course a modern-day girl like me doesn’t believe in fairy tales. I’ve read my Eva Illouz.  I know that “love hurts” and the trope of modern romance is irony.

Oh shoot, I’m late. I have to be at Mr. Black’s office in five minutes.

I arrive, panting, a flush on my face. Mr. Black’s secretary, a perfectly dressed blond with well-behaved hair, ushers me into his waiting room and asks if I would like some water or a paper towel to wipe the perspiration off my face. I want to disappear. Why did I sprint across campus?

“Ms. Irons? Come in,” says a voice as smooth and velvety as a panther. I look up to see the most beautiful man I have ever encountered. His eyes blacker than black. His hair a golden brown swept back from his brow. And his lips, oh, those kissable lips, full and red and pulled into something between a sneer and a smile.

I walk across the room, trying not to tremble in his gaze. I move past him and electricity circulates between our bodies.

And then I trip, flat onto my face.

Mr. Black reaches out his arms, trying to break my fall, and our bodies are pressed together. It is more than I can take. I let out a gasp.

***

Mr. Black’s apartment is everything cold and sleek and modern. It is bereft of clutter. White walls, abstract paintings, utilitarian light fixtures more suitable to a theater than a home.

I sit on the white leather couch, nervously chewing my lip and looking up at him.

“Ms. Irons,” he says, “if we are going to go any further with this relationship there is something I need you to sign.”

He hands me a contract.

I look at it. 

1. The submissive will only touch the sacred objects when instructed to do so.
2. The submissive will refer to the dominant as Dr., Sir, Professor, or Herr Doktor at all times.
3. The submissive will stay thin, pale and trembling at all times, awaiting the dominant’s touch in order to truly understand her desires.

There was more.

“This is sexist!” I throw the contact on the ground, petulantly, like a small child.

“Careful, Ms. Irons. If you act like a child, you might get treated like one,” he says, a sharp edge to his otherwise sexy voice.

“What does that mean?” I ask, a tingle running along my spine.

“If you sign, I’ll explain everything,” he purrs.

I sign. What choice did I have?

***

I’m kneeling on the floor before him. I have never felt more afraid and more excited.

“So,” he asks, “what do you think of my secret?”

His secret, his secret room, his read room of pain(ful) abstract thought.

“Can I touch it?” I ask, stretching out my fingers toward what lies between his hands.

Slap!

Ouch, that hurt.

“No, you cannot touch my 1939 German edition of Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process,” he snarls.

Suddenly my arms are pinned over my head. He snaps the handcuffs shut and takes the key and puts it into the pocket of his faded jeans. Oh, the beauty of his body, the loose jeans, his eight-pack abs, his alabaster skin.

“You have no idea how valuable this is. Without this book, Foucault would never have written Discipline and Punish!” he says as he rubs a 1975 original edition of Surveiller et punir over my quivering body.

“Please, Herr Doktor. Professor. Sir?” I moan, unable to contain my desire to get my hands on all the beautiful books around me, the Zizek, the Butler, the Derrida. Oh, the Derrida.

***

The next morning as I walk across campus, what should be the walk of shame transforms into something that makes me glow from the inside out. Oh, the read room of pain(ful) abstract thought. My beautiful lover’s dirty little secret. And now my dirty little secret, too. I can’t wait to go back.

The poster session is an important but usually humble component of an academic conference -- though you’d never know that from a promotional video for one held at the University of Oxford this month. The clip looks like the trailer for a sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster. The name of the conference, Force 2015, sounds like one, too.

Besides its snappy acronym, the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship group (“a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders”) has a manifesto offering a comprehensive vision of post-Gutenbergian intellectual life. Issued in 2011, it forecasts “a future in which scientific information and scholarly communication more generally become part of a global, universal and explicit network of knowledge; where every claim, hypothesis, argument -- every significant element of the discourse -- can be explicitly represented, along with supporting data, software, workflows, multimedia, external commentary and information about provenance. In this world of networked knowledge objects, it would be clear how the entities and discourse components are related to each other, including relationships to previous scholarship; learning about a new topic means absorbing networks of information, not individually reading thousands of documents....”

The new Web site 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication may not have been intended as an interim report on how that future is shaping up, but it has the features of one even so. It’s the online complement to the Force 2015 poster of the same name, prepared by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, both from Utrecht University Library in the Netherlands. (Bosman is the subject librarian in the geosciences; Kramer, in the life sciences and medicine.)

The most striking element of both the poster and the site is a multicolored circular chart that looks something like a zodiac or gaming wheel. (See bottom of this article for a larger version than appears on top.) It flashes by in the opening seconds of the aforementioned video, too fast for the viewer to notice that it is divided into six sectors: discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. There are little logos in each, representing digital tools and products. You find the Google Docs icon in “analysis,” for example, and Zotero in “writing,” while academia.edu appears in “outreach.”

It’s the Great Cycle of Research Life, so to speak -- beginning with, and ever returning to, the zone marked “discovery.” It would be possible to argue with how sequential the process is in real life, and I’m not persuaded that some of the icons fit perfectly into their assigned slots. But another element of the chart’s design adds to its value by conveying the pace of change. The circle actually consists of concentric circles, marking off five-year intervals between 2000 and 2015. The location of an icon indicates when it came into use, with a very few, in the chart's core, having been around way back in the 1990s.

After contemplating the 101 Innovations mandala for a while, I contacted the site's creators in hopes of understanding its mysteries. At a poster session, there’s usually someone around to explain things only implicit in the poster itself, which can otherwise be puzzling.

That’s true especially of the diagrams making up the site’s “workflow pages.” Each resembles an extremely simple flowchart: a series of boxes, representing the six phases of research, with various logos plugged in. (Rather than endure a thousand words of description, just go have a look.) The charts also had labels such as “traditional” and “innovative.” 

The parts each made sense, but the whole seemed opaque. Kramer elucidated things in an e-mail discussion, with some of her responses prepared jointly with her collaborator, Bosman. The site represents the tip of an iceberg: they have collected a database “contain[ing] details of some 15 attributes of over 400 innovative tools and sites,” most of which didn’t make it to the poster or Web site. “We are curious [about] the range of innovation,” they told me, “not the entire range of products per se.”

My best guess had been that the workflow charts might have been intended as recommendations of how researchers could combine the available digital tools. That, it turns out, was wide of the mark. The charts are heuristic rather than prescriptive.

“None of the workflow charts are meant as templates for researchers to adopt,” Kramer and Bosman explained, “more as primers for them to think about the tools they use and the type of workflow that best characterizes the way they work.” The charts provide “a starting point for discussions with researcher groups, such as graduate students, postdocs and faculty,” in order to determine existing practices and developing needs.

The goal is to elicit users’ “reasons for choosing specific tools -- what factors influence their decisions to switch to new tools and incorporate them” in their work. “[W]e plan to have a closer look at the coverage of digital humanities tools in our database, and look at disciplinary variations in our interpretations of most important developments, opportunities, etc.”

Bosman and Kramer also developed a typology of scholarly workflows, ranging from the neo-Luddite to the way-early adopter. “[W]e defined 'traditional' as a type of workflow that essentially would not have altered much from that of the print age, ‘modern’ as making use of online tools that enable researchers to consume information/functionality (roughly Web 1.0), ‘innovative’ as using more recent tools that enable online discussion, collaboration and active contribution (roughly Web 2.0) and ‘experimental’ as using tools that are currently being developed and have yet to establish themselves (‘bleeding edge’).”

The charts mention “virtual suites,” with no explanation. That turns out to be a reference to the shape of things to come: integrated packages of tools covering every stage of the research project, from brainstorm through the publication of scholarship and the archiving of data.

“My impression,” wrote Kramer, “is that publishers/organizations are working more and more towards providing tools for all stages of the workflow, and will probably start marketing them as such in the future. It is of course up to any individual researcher to decide whether she/he would want to use such a suite in its entirety, but it seems to be to the benefit of the publisher to offer the possibility, and convince institutions to buy into the whole package deal. Such developments would encourage siloing of workflows, with potential limited interoperability with other tools and thus lock in to a specific publisher/organization. This is not necessarily a good thing.”

Agreed. The next step would be for researchers to sign over their own brains to the company providing the suite, which seems like carrying the principle of intellectual property altogether too far.

“On the other hand,” Kramer pointed out, “we found that many new tools have been developed by researchers at the Ph.D./postdoc level (interestingly, many of them biomedical or bioinformatics scientists) who are frustrated with the current solutions available to them. Another trend we observe is that once these innovations prove useful and popular, they are often bought by large publishers.”

So in the foreseeable future “there will remain a mixture of new, independent innovations and consolidation of existing tools, often in a publisher's ‘suite.’”

The alternative would be a large-scale return to paper and ink. Some of us wouldn’t mind, but nobody should count on it.