1000 times yes!

How do we agree or contest this assertion of what the humanities does?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick echoes this sentiment and opines that is is necessary for the humanities to make a first change here.

This is a useful distillation of some activities that publishers carry out for academic work.

innnnteressssting.

I wonder if this is echoed in/of/from the job market in the humanities also?

Does it? DOES IT?!?!

I strongly believe that in the humanities some of these challenges can be overcome by simple means of awareness-raising and contradicting falsely-held opinions about how things work.

licensing is an under-explored mechanism for exerting control on the scholcomm system. my experience is that in the humanities folks get burned out on copyright/fair use by being forced through the ringer for permissions in classrooms or thesis/dissertations.

The economy of prestige is a topic of great concern across academia, especially as we move into the brave new world of digital scholarship.

This point of where labour sits in the scholarly communication system is inextricably tied to economics, both of which are often obscured for the author and reader. How does a thing go from your computer to a publication? Actually, thinking it through now, some of those steps might actually be more visible in the humanities than the sciences.

What we are seeing is that the removal of these barriers is uncovering new barriers - like access to technological tools necessary to get to this research. And we're also seeing new barriers erected - like the major publishing companies investing in acquiring more pieces of the pipeline between the author and the reader.

Agreed. However, in practice it has mostly been applied to scholarly research published in journals.

This cross-references nicely with Shiela Brennen's Public, First piece.

Is this the character of a public humanities that we still sense?

are we in a third epoch now? how might it be characterized?

knowing this complicated history of moralizing that produced an early public humanities, how can we be socially engaged, embrace openness, but resist the potential prying of eyes that would seek to diminish or upset the goals of a modern open humanities?

Do we agree? What cultural or societal indicators can we point out that show otherwise, or affirm this claim? I think part of what I am interested in is making this seem less true.

ooof. Seems to me like this divide has continued and deepened over time, with the exception of the digital humanities which is purposeful about translation of academic humanities work to/across an open internet to whomever is on the other side of the tube.

And I think we still have a common conception of a "public intellectual" that may be a humanist, or someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Is it useful to claim and apply a term that has baggage to describe working with the public in mind as an audience?

For me this sounds more like a definition of cultural heritage, which often present humanistic work to the public, but what do we lose when PH is owned by organizations?

Are these the goals of all public humanities work? If not, what would we like to claim that the goals should be?

Broadly defined accessibility, and as mentioned above, discoverability, are other key characteristics. Again, as a librarian, I know that both of those things are accomplished through well-structured data, extensive project pre-planning and development, descriptive metadata, and some level of technical knowledge and/or infrastructure. Does that mean that a future-oriented public humanities must include enriched data with an information scientist co-constructing the layers underneath the "scholarship"?

This and next paragraph sound a lot like the design thinking user experience buzz that is present in tech culture these days. Empathy as a core principle in humanistic scholarship. Would it be too strong to claim empathy as another key characteristic of a new public/open humanities?

Would it be too backwards to work with our communities/audiences to define our research agendas and projects? What are the needs of your neighborhood, apartment complex, or city commission district and how can your scholarship connect and inform? That seems like an impossible task for a university to be that local/outward facing. But what if?

Yes, good! So, we must teach our colleagues to do specialized work for a dissertation committee, and then a tenure committee in a specific department, and then a small group of co-specialists, and all the while identifying an audience outside the academy. Of course we couldn't explore this topic very deeply without questioning the systems that disallow this very thing to be possible. I am cautiously optimistic... but wholly appreciate Brennan putting this in writing so we can hearken to it as a precept.

This raises a really hard question for me, a librarian: what does it mean that libraries, archives and museums are often the playplaces of academics, and how does that nullify the possibility of a true public orientation? I think its possible to argue that humanities projects can often become isolated within the network of libraries, archives, and museums. What other cultural or social organizations could be the emergent vehicle for humanities scholarship to flow into the world?

interesting. So, the field adapted to new forms of public engagement, but didn't take the opportunity to evolve/transform the "scholarly communication" processes and methods of the time. What opportunity do we have now then, to respond to labor movements, socio-political chances, AND challenge the scholarly communication system as we know it?

The applied, service-driven nature of this kind of labor, in my opinion, is perhaps why it has been devalued in the academy. In the Research Enterprise University, this work looks like the gray category of "Service" that is hard to quantify, and thus hard to count in a matrix of prestige. Is this taught into, or out of graduate programs?

How do we avoid othering "the public" in a more open humanities scholarship? Attaching the work directly to a community seems to be part of the solution. Personalizing and humanizing the subjects of our work... I wonder if much of this impulse happens in classrooms, and so is not readily 'public', but is part of a core value for many humanists.

Ok, so, Brennan is arguing that an essential characteristic of public humanities is invitating in, rather than promoting to a particular community. I like that as a core value.

I appreciate how public fits and works well in history, due to the connection with museums, historical societies, etc. How would one practice Public American Literature, or Public Asian Religions? The connection is a little less clear in non-history disciplines.

Having a website for your research does not a public humanist make. What I read here is that the academic and applied discipline of public history is focused on community engagement (think museum education program for example.) Whats the opposite of that? Are regular historians not necessarily focused on the community/public audience?

I'd be interested to ask this question again these days... have ALL academics lost their publics, or is this more of a humanities issue? I think the sciences in recent years have done lots to regain/create a public audience for their work. I think we could even say that the data-focused social sciences are having a heyday.