The Digital Scholar

I started Recollecting Nemasket as a local history blog for two principal reasons: as a means of personal fulfillment and as an effort to make local history more readily available to the community.

Like all scholars, digital or otherwise, I feel passionately about my subject. Writing about local history gives me a means of self-expression, and digitally publishing my scholarship in a field in which I have expertise easily allows me to share what I learn with the public.

Michael J. Maddigan

By publishing digitally, I am afforded a number of advantages that are not always available through more “traditional” publishing. For 11 years, I have written a local history newspaper column also known as “Recollecting Nemasket” for the Middleboro Gazette. However, a newspaper column can be restrictive in regards to the limitations that are placed on the subject or format of an article. Topics that require a more lengthy, more detailed, or more technical analysis are generally not best served in a newspaper column. Because digital publishing is less restrictive, it permits me to publish longer works, more technical works, works with more images, portions of longer works that I have yet to complete–essentially whatever I choose. A website may also be used as a “proving ground” where articles can be subjected to criticism and comment before they are published elsewhere.

I find that digital scholarship is also advantageous because it is more immediate, more interactive, more accessible, and less ephemeral than traditional publishing. It is also less expensive. My blog costs me nothing beyond the time that I put into it. Readers can read my posts as they are published and respond to them nearly instantaneously, providing feedback on what I write and occasionally offering a differing perspective. With traditional publishing, the process of receiving feedback is much more arduous. And unlike traditional scholarship published in books, magazines, and journals, digital scholarship does not necessarily go out of print or become unavailable when the next issue is published.

As with more traditionally published scholarship, the caliber of digital scholarship on the Web varies greatly. My intention is to maintain a high standard of scholarship for Recollecting Nemasket, partly in keeping with the goal of developing the website as a local history resource for the community. Despite the fact that its subject matter–the history of Middleborough and Lakeville, Massachusetts–is relatively esoteric with probably a limited appeal beyond these two communities, it is no less deserving of serious scholarly treatment. I believe that the best digital scholarship is that which draws upon the advantages of both digital and traditional publishing, combining the small expense, the immediacy, the interactive nature, the accessibility for readers, and the frequency that digital publishing affords with the high level of academic standards that is associated with more traditional scholarship.

Michael J. Maddigan is the author/publisher of Recollecting Nemasket, a blog devoted to the history of Middleborough and Lakeville, Massachusetts. He currently serves as Curator of the Middleborough Historical Museum, and his book Middleborough (Images of America) is due to be published in October 2009.

A Digital Scholar is someone who uses new publishing technologies to publish, distribute, and market his or her intellectual work. This definition paints a rather broad picture of the kinds of intellectual work this Digital Scholar might produce and the publishing mechanisms and strategies that he or she might use.

The wonderful thing about new publishing technologies is that they practically allow anyone to take advantage of them. This democratic approach to publishing means that anyone with an intellectual passion can now find a means of publishing and distributing his or her ideas and become a Digital Scholar.

Professors and other practicing academics who become Digital Scholars find that these new publishing platforms force them to rethink how they create and distribute their work, and in the process give new life to their scholarship. These Digital Scholars also find a far greater audience for their ideas than they normally would within the confining walls of academia, thereby helping to build their reputations to a scale that is far greater than what was before possible.

Independent scholars and other people who left the academic rat race to pursue other forms of employment find that by becoming Digital Scholars they are by no means abandoning the exciting exchange of ideas that universities seemed to monopolize. These Digital Scholars discover that publishing their own academic work allows them to define the level of scholarship they want to produce and in the course of doing so gain a greater sense of respect and authority for their thoughts and ideas than they ever commanded or found within a university setting.

Becoming a Digital Scholar does not require the use of a particular set of publishing technologies, because these new technologies can be combined and used in ways to suit the goals of any individual scholar. Some Digital Scholars write blogs, some publish e-books, some use social networking websites, like Facebook, to create intellectual online communities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and some create podcasts or videos to distribute lectures on the web. Many Digital Scholars combine some or all of these publishing mechanisms so that they feed on one another and reach a greater audience. Writers of blogs might use its contents as a basis for creating an e-book and then use the blog to publicize the book.

Becoming a Digital Scholar does not mean completely abandoning the traditional publishing world either. Many Digital Scholars find that these new publishing activities help lead them to traditional publishing opportunities that they may not have found otherwise. In fact, participation in this new world of publishing is becoming a requirement before entering the traditional world of print.

Are you a Digital Scholar? Use the comment link to share your experiences.

Even after I decided to leave academia to pursue librarianship, I continued to hold on to the idea that some day I would write my book. I loved the epic process of writing my dissertation, and I envisioned the day when a book with my name on it would sit on someone else’s bookshelf and collect dust. But with a full-time job and two young kids, that fantasy was simply going to have to remain on hold.

Finally, my chance arrived. My wife and I decided to move to a less expensive area to live, and as part of the deal I would stop working, manage the kids, and write my book. After coordinating our move, making sure the kids kept busy over the summer, and constantly pinching myself to make sure my good fortune was real, I jumped into researching and writing the first day my kids started school in the fall. I spent my days gathering research materials, compiling data, and taking notes. By the time spring rolled around, I had learned enough about my topic to start writing, and suddenly everything grounded to a halt.

How’s the Book Coming?

I wasn’t experiencing writer’s block, nor was I bored by the project. No, what stopped me cold was that I had spent almost a year working on a book, and anytime someone asked me, “How’s the book coming?”, all I could say was, “Good, but you know it’s a long, hard process.” For all the work I had been doing, I basically had nothing tangible to show for it. More than this, the reality of how difficult it was going to be to convince a publisher to take on an unpublished, unaffiliated writer was beginning to sink in. Was I going to spend three years or more of my life isolated in my library writing a book that had no guarantee of ever being published?

I decided to switch gears and instead to start a website where I could publish the results of my year’s work. I turned my attention to creating and designing a website called Early American Crime, and then I started writing. Now when family and friends asked me how my book was coming along, I could point them to my website and show them. After awhile people I didn’t even know started responding to my posts and asking me questions. I began meeting other website authors who linked to my website and wrote about similar topics. Publishers started sending me books to review. And I watched as my site statistics continued to rise at a significant rate every month.

After several months of creating posts for my website, I realized that I hadn’t abandoned my book after all, because now I had plenty of material to package together into a book. I also discovered that there are a multitude of options and outlets for publishing my potential book. I could publish it electronically. I could publish it for free or sell it for a price that I set. I could even become my own publisher by printing, marketing, and distributing it myself. Even more, the website I built would not only provide content for my book, but it could serve as a marketing platform for it as well. And the book, in turn, would become a medium for advertising my website.

Filling a Gap

Little did I know when I started my website that I was setting myself up to become a full participant in the future of publishing. I now understood the importance of interconnecting different writing mediums and how this practice was creating a publishing revolution.

Unfortunately, when I first started publishing on the web, there didn’t seem to be a lot of guidance for someone who wanted to publish a serious website like me. Most of the books and resources about creating websites and blogs were fairly technical in their approach or were focused on how to make money through blogging. I wasn’t against making money, but doing so certainly was not the sole purpose for creating my website. In getting my website up and running, I had to filter the information I found as I went along. All the while, I wished that there was some resource that could plainly tell me the best way to create a website with my scholarly needs in mind.

The Digital Scholar is my attempt to fill this gap. Through this website, I intend to offer what I have learned, and will continue to learn, in my experience as a digital scholar. The site will also provide a platform for discussing changes in the world of publishing and how scholars will need, and want, to adapt to it. The new world of publishing offers scholarly authors more control over the dissemination of their ideas than ever before. The Digital Scholar will show you how to find fulfillment through publishing and how to empower yourself to become the scholar you always wanted to become.

I would love to hear stories from other digital scholars about why they became one, how they came up with the idea to start their project, and what their goals are for publishing. Share your experience in the comments section for this post or contact me.