The text of the talk Kirschenbaum delivered at the 2013 MLA Presidential Forum Avenues of Access session on “Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication.” The talk is focused on network-based scholarly discourse, and their enhancement and dispersion through a number of different online social network technologies. Kirschenbaum in particular notes the issue of rapid migration from one communication channel to another.
I come before you today to say this: I have not blogged every good idea I have ever had. I have not tweeted every insight or reference or revelation. There’s stuff I keep to myself, or better, stuff I release strategically rather than spontaneously, and it will fall to all of us, on MLA Commons and elsewhere, to find our own personal and professional comfort zones regarding what we give out to our contacts and groups, the membership at large, the public at large. Access always entails risk, and while we know scholarship is not a zero-sum game, more tangible and no less sustaining forms of reputation and reward sometimes even often are.
I’m currently on Twitter, Slideshare, Zotero, Google+, Facebook, and DH Answers, to name just a few. I want to migrate and port not just my content but also my reputation and relations.