Strangely, I just wrote a blog post about the far-flung future of digital scholarship.

I think that the digital scholarship has many advantages and opportunities for innovation. Historians can examine sources and communicate their work far faster and far more easily than ever before in human history. We are all digital historians in 2015 - just reading this post demonstrates that fact. It's not just about using the much talked about digital tools though. Imagine how much faster you write and edit since you are using a word processor, not a typewriter or (heaven forbid) handwriting. How easier it is to contact colleagues and journals using email rather than waiting for a letter. These sorts of "digital advantages" are easily overlooked when we talk about digital scholarship, but they have undoubtedly changed the profession in profound ways. You don't have do Big Data or coding to be a digital historian.

That also touches on an important distinction in digital scholarship. There are some parts which clearly just make analog methods faster and more efficiently, like a word processor vs. a typewriter. Or using OCR to find relevant information in a large book. Then there are things which are uniquely digital, like Big Data. These are methods or discoveries that can only be possible in digital scholarship, and were impossible for humans to do without computers or networks.

If you haven't already been able to figure it out, I am firmly on the side of digital scholarship. I think more journals ought to be open-access and online. I think that making more information freely available only helps our discipline grow, and getting away from the confines of print publication allows for more flexible scholarship (more words allowed, more images, etc). I think every archive should be digitized and made available online - we are in the age of knowledge proliferation and fighting that tide will hopefully be on the wrong side of history. The information we can access, the better we can use digital tools to parse it, and the more comprehensive our research and knowledge about the past will be.

On the other hand, there are some dangers. I think that digital tools makes academics lazy. It's very easy to just search for a specific set of terms in a digitized source or academic publication - meaning that we read "around" a topic a lot less. Because we have the ability to pinpoint the information we want, we sometimes miss out on other relevant information. I see this a lot in the generation of students below me, where their essays are sometimes obviously cherry-picked and they don't actually understand the argument they are making within the context of the historical record. Or, they just access the first handful of articles linked on a Wikipedia page. I have had entire classrooms not even visit the library for an assignment, because everything was done online. I wonder what the next generation of scholars will be like? Maybe it requires new ways of teaching the craft of history to take into account these.. temptations. I liked the term "responsible digital scholarship" and I think there's something there which young and old historians need to recognize.

As much as I love the internet, I worry that the rise of digital humanities will tend to privlidge certain kinds of printed sources in Western languages more than ever before. One major problem with a great many modern computer programs used for digital humanities is that they were developed mostly with the need and requirements of English-speakers in mind. This problem is particularly acute in my mind regarding sources in non-Latin alphabets.

I research paper usage and paper as a medium in imperial China, and this topic reminds me of a quote that Professor McDermott cites in his book "A Social History of the Chinese Book". In the 16th Century a man during the Mind Dynasty said, "Writing a book is not as good as copying a book." [作书不如抄书] (p. 77)

At the time, literati held the notion that reading a book was not enough to understand it. But after copying it (memorizing it), one could finally fully understand the material. It seems to me this has evolved from copying to reading, and has now transformed once again in today's researching culture from reading to skimming (or as CandianHistorian said, 'cherry-picking') information.

Access to information is certainly a blessing and a curse. I believe in all the positives that have already been identified by other posts in this topic. The negative, in my opinion, is its affect on the realm of publishing. If you really want to, anyone can get published if you are well-networked or willing to spend a few dollars. Digitalism has exasperated the issue. I believe this environment dilutes information as those who are truly passionate fail to be distinguished, or simply neglected, from those who are less passionate. It is my belief that the typewriters of yesteryear deterred those less-passionate individuals, much like copying a book by hand may have deterred many in the Ming dynasty to become received as educated.

Furthermore, I blame digitalism on the bland writing style that defines academia. Researchers skim and cherry-pick in part because it's faster, but also because it can be tedious. I can't verify anything, but the writing style in academia hasn't seemingly changed in decades. I think it could use some flamboyancy, or some prose. But publishers are stuck in a model that churns out paper after paper, all looking identical because it gets you 'on the track' as a researcher. Superfluous writing is viewed as either a waste of time/space or as historical fiction. But why not invigorate something that lulls readers to sleep? Why not use writing style to demonstrate passion? (maybe I am off topic...)

In short, as someone with an interest in paper, it shouldn't startle you that I fall on the pessimistic side of the fence regarding digitalism.

I just wanted to point out the Stoa Consortium and its mission.