Speaking Back to the Speaker Ban: Oral History Practice And Free Speech Activism

Making Digital Work Public Work

I am trying to listen: doing public work is different from making academic work public. I fear this project falls in between these, a liminal space in which I cannot fully hail this project as one rooted in conversation with the communities I want to commune with, nor can I critique its digital form as a tactical maneuver in which I proclaim this text to now be public by the fact holds its own URL. I am just not there yet. In the forthcoming Disrupting the Digital Humanities, Jesse Stommel defines public digital humanities as “built around networked learning communities, not repositories for content.” He continues, explaining that “its scholarly product is a conversation, one that engages a broad public while blurring the distinction between research, teaching, service, and outreach.”[1] This project, was, in part, an experiment in understanding how oral history practice might speak back to explorations of self, activism, digital scholarship, and free speech. The distinctions I want so badly to draw between these topics and their relationships to research, teaching, service, and outreach are difficult to draft, and yet, I might be able to if I tried. This signals to me that I am not yet at work on fully public digital scholarship. Similarly, my hope is that this project will indeed incite a conversation as part of its product, but the question remains with whom? Again, I am just not there yet.

I am trying to listen: digital is political. This project has an explicit partisan agenda that requires me to err on the side of overt subjectivity, an inevitable consequence of the personal nature of my study and my engagement in campus activism. I am uncertain whether the digital form of this project mitigates or exacerbates the partisan nature of the work. Certainly though, digital scholarship is not without its own political associations. “For all of its vaunted innovation, the digital humanities actually borrows a lot of its infrastructure, data models, and visual rhetoric from other areas, and particularly from models developed for business applications,” Miriam Posner explains in “The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities.” I do not know whether the associations and applications that Scalar relies on work in concert or discord with my own. I am not there yet.[2]

I am trying to listen: available is not always accessible. If there are opportunities for digital work to assist in activism, it must be done as a reciprocal dialogue, in which the community assists as much in the cultivation of the scholarly product--the conversation--as in the digital form. The processes of social change matter as much as reaching a final goal. The same is true for the creation of digital scholarship. In this project, I am uncertain whether I have made process an equal partner with product. As with oral history, digital scholarship offers the potential to make stories accessible to broad publics and encourages people to become creators of their own stories. Both of these practices are supposedly transformative. And yet, as digital scholarship settles into an uneasy institutional adolescence, we are still thinking through the ethical use of research data. The field of oral history offers forty years of thinking through “liberatory and progressive research methods that challenge traditional structures of knowledge,” and yet, the connections to be made between digital scholarship, accessibility, and oral history practice are still slight. I am not there yet.[3]
[1] Stommel, Jesse, “The Public Digital Humanities,” Disrupting the Digital Humanities, January 9, 2015.
[2] Posner, Miriam, “What’s Next? The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” Miriam Posner’s Blog, July 22, 2015.
[3] Cheiner, Else, “Oral History and Open Access: Fulfilling the Promise of Democratizing Knowledge,” New American Notes Online, Vol 5, 2015.

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