recursivepublic.net

I’ve had lots of positive response, and a couple of really perceptive responses to the idea of “modulations,” both of which confirm my own understandings. At the heart of my question “What does it mean to remix scholarship?” is an implicit critique of the “textualist” answer, perhaps, that is, the idea that remixing a text is about cutting and pasting it into a new context. But when scholars write an article it has, or is supposed to have, a coherence that is not at the level of the text itself–but at the level of concepts and arguments. Simply plucking paragraphs out and re-arranging them might work when you are doing Kathy Acker-style plagiarism (where the effect depends in part on the recognizability of those passages) or Burroghs-Gysin style cut-ups (where it is actually a compositional technique, not a remix), or writing a group report or a grant proposal with a team of 5 or more people (where it is actually a form of collaborative re-writing). However, when someone writes and publishes a scholarly article, simply cutting and pasting text rarely amounts to anything more than what we already do: citation. Academics cite other academics. There is, however, a considerable subtlety to that process, and a very big difference between citing a passage of something that is particularly evocative, and citing–or using–a concept developed in an article or book.

One distinction that might be important here is the difference between building on an argument or concept (whatever that might mean) and a more prosaic form of consuming an argument, which can benefit in other ways from being made freely available. So James Boyle implied this in a response he offered to my initial post:

My own experience with remix leads me to guess that you won’t get it here in any large way but that you shouldn’t be disappointed by that — people remix for a reason… F/OSS teaches us that, so does ccMixter. (So does your book) Recursivity is means not end and we can’t reify it as end…. So the moment you get remix is when people say — I want to use Kelty in my class, but his examples suck, or this argument is too long. That’ll take a while. The recursive process only comes after a.) buy in b.) use c.) appearance of some new task for which remix is necessary/helpful (including showing off).

Such uses a probably a necessary first step towards the kind of conceptual, or practical, remix I’m calling modulation. Customization, re-use, the ability to translate, localize, to customize, to iterate, to debug or extend or clarify for specific contexts–these are the sine qua non of progress in terms of inquiry, but not necessarily a sufficient step towards it.

A related reaction came from Joe Karaganis of the Social Sciences Research Council, who has repeatedly and boldly experimented with problems of this sort. He reminded me of the project on The Politics of Open Source Adoption that he organized, and which was set up in such a way as to encourage contribution, modulation, re-use and so forth. Of that project, Karaganis said:

My bet was that a wiki would be a good tool for capturing the large body of anecdote about (and personal experience with) adoption efforts in the F/OSS community — but which had remained informal. Bet #2 was that the geographical and sectoral approach would provide the kind of modularity that such a project needed. Bet #3 was that the F/OSS community would have the right mix of passion/instructive failures/technical competence to make this effectively viral. None of these bets really panned out. We had a couple significant contributions (including from Eric Raymond) but nothing like my initial hopes for it. The report is solid, imho, but remained a pretty conventional collaboration–and my conclusion was that the conventionality of the report/essay structure was a disincentive for outside contributors. Adding a bit to an 8000 wd ‘authored’ essay is not the same adding a paragraph to a wikipedia page. Both the length, structure, and authoredness probably played a role here.

This experience actually fits well with my own understanding of modulation of the practices of free software. In the terms I set out in the book, this project tried to modulate the practices of free software by substituting a kind of report (something like a post-mortem combined with a research question (”Why does or doesn’t open source take hold in some places and not others?”). I think Karaganis is right on that the incentive to contribute is high here–because it entails substantial work, and it is perhaps less “instrumental” than it could be (e.g. would a wiki consisting entirely of “strategies to use with management to get OS adopted” have been more narrowly useful?). On the other hand, the report is there, it is freely available and can be re-used– and I don’t think we have honestly started to ask what kind of re-use that might be. Issues of originality, credit, ownership (in a non-legal sense) are pretty tightly mixed up. Related to this are the kinds of questions that some legal and business scholars (like Christopher Sprigman, Kathryn Strandburg and Fiona Murray) are asking about the nature of re-use and ownership in domains like fashion, stand-up comedy or science. (a brief bibliography is here. Joe also points to the freely available collection “Structures of Participation in Digital Culture,” which I think I will have to feature some selections from here…).

To cut this short: one of the things I hope to think about in this project is the think-like character of what we produce as scholars, beyond the text as it exists in digital form. Concepts, conceived of as tools, what we work with everyday in investigating problems in the world, but we don’t have a very good understanding of how these tools circulate, what they are made of, how we come to feel attachment to them (or ownership over them), and how they might be combined in surprising ways.