In a recent essay, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” Todd Presner identifies as the core Utopian idea of the Digital Humanities, “participation without condition.” For Presner this concept begins with how DH is making the walls of the academy porous through its “conceiving of scholarship in ways that foundationally involve community partners, cultural institutions, the private sector, non-profits, government agencies, and slices of the general public,” thus expanding “both the notion of scholarship and the public sphere in order to create new sites and nodes of engagement, documentation, and collaboration.” In so doing, DHers “are able to place questions of social justice and civic engagement, for example, front-and-center; they are able to revitalize the cultural record in ways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy into the expanded public sphere.”

Presner’s discussion of what might be called DH’s “Participatory Turn” can be reformulated for humanities scholars and teachers into a more specific and crucial question concerning how we might best reach productively beyond the walls of the literary classroom. Such a question gains added force from three relevant contexts: (1) David Marshall’s observation that the current academy is a 19^th century institution in which a 20^th century curriculum is taught to 21^st century students; (2) The fact that most humanities undergraduates don’t even know that there is such a thing as humanities research; and (3) The assertion made by Donald Brinkman of Microsoft Research that humanists don’t just need “big data,” they need “deep data.” These contexts raise at least three important questions: (1) How can humanists bring our research into the graduate and undergraduate classroom?; (2) How can we best curate and explore our datasets? and (3) How can we fruitfully engage the public, “citizen humanists,” in the work of the humanities, helping to deepen our data and the questions we ask of it?

I think these are key questions both for the future of DH and the future of the Humanities, well worth discussing at a THATCamp devoted to Leadership. They cut across many aspects of DH work, from teaching, to coding, to archives, to editing, to publishing, to licensing, and crowdsourcing.

There are many complicated debates about open-access, peer review, and the economics of publishing. It’s complicated, and many ideas have been proposed. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to summarize two of them. The conservative position is that pre-publication peer-review is essential to good scholarly work. It’s fair to say that this is the default position of most scholars and scholarly institutions. The radical position is that scholars should “liberate” their scholarship and publish only in open-access venues. As you would expect, these two ideas frequently antagonistic. Most of the concrete proposals are essentially competitive, as in attempts to replace existing journals with open-access journals or to move peer review to post-publication.

But there is no reason that the scholarly value of pre-publication peer-review and the scholarly value of open access need to conflict. What the academy needs is a solution that is realistic, and recognizes that the entrenched system of corporate publication and tenure review is unlikely to go away, or at least unlikely to change quickly. And it needs a solution that is optimistic because it tries to take advantage of the internet’s low marginal costs and rapid distribution that makes open access publication possible.

Our colleagues in physics, mathematics, computer sciences, and the like already have such a solution in the arXiv e-print server. arXiv hosts pre-prints (or “e-prints”) of articles that will be published in peer review journals. Scholars upload these documents which are then freely available to the world much sooner than they will be available in gated journals. (There are many descriptors for levels of open access: let’s call this “good enough” open access.) For those who need them, the peer-reviewed version of the articles will still be available in the traditional venues.

I propose a session that will bring together people who are interested in bringing about a pre-print server for the humanities. Make no mistake: the problem is not technological, it is institutional. What is needed to change academic publishing is the will to put such a solution in place—in a word, leadership. These are the kinds of people at THATCamp Leadership who could help such a session:

• scholars who could explain what they would hope to gain from a pre-print server,
• leaders of professional organizations (AHA, OAH, MLA, ACLS, etc.) who could make the idea palatable to scholars in their disciplines,
• grant writers and university administrators—especially in libraries—who would be willing to underwrite such an experimental project, and
• coder-scholars who would be able to build a prototype, or at least to discuss what would go into a prototype.

The goal of the session will be to produce a brief document that will describe the essentials of a humanities pre-print server. And hopefully the session will forge connections between the people who can make this idea happen.