Chapter 6 Open Practice

Cellini’s Perseus and Digital Scholarship

Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze statue of Perseus holding aloft the head of Medusa stands in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. I saw it after having given a talk on digital scholarship, and thus the two topics merged into this metaphor. Like any great work of art, Cellini’s Perseus can bear many different interpretations, many of them contradictory, and suggest meanings never intended. In this section, I will explore three such interpretations of Cellini’s Renaissance artwork and make links to aspects of digital scholarship.

The first interpretation relates to representations of power and more explicitly misogyny. Cellini’s statue of Perseus is a visceral, dynamic, challenging piece of work. But it can also be read as a blatant representation of misogyny. Coretti (2015) argues that, even at the time of its creation in 1554, the statue was intended to legitimize patriarchal power and was a response to the growing power of Medici women. Medusa has long been a symbol of male oppression of female power. As Johnston (2016) argues, Medusa is a recurring theme in representations of women and can be seen as “the original ‘nasty woman’”: “In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.”

As well, as an artistic achievement, Cellini’s statue was a major technological breakthrough. According to Cellini’s (1728) own account, it was a Frankenstein-like act of intense, life-giving creation. His Vita is one of the most influential works in shaping the concept of the romantic vision of the artist generally, and more specifically of Cellini himself, as passionate, rebellious, dangerous, and inspired—a vision that would find much resonance later with figures such as Byron but that also has echoes in the lone creator myth that permeates much of Silicon Valley and the adulation of personalities such as Steve Jobs. Perseus is cast in bronze, and this medium is significant both in how Cellini portrays himself and in how he is perceived as an artist. The casting process itself is captured in a dramatic sequence in the Vita. Unlike a marble sculpture or a painting, the culmination of a gradual process, the bronze casting process has a definite dénouement. In the Vita, this is portrayed with religious allusions to the moment of creation and Christ’s resurrection. Suffering from a fever, Cellini claimed that he left the casting to his workers: “I said to them, ‘By tomorrow morning I shall be dead.’” He then had a vision in his fever and was warned to save the casting: “He spoke in the sad and grievous tones of those who proclaim to doomed men that their last hour has tolled. ‘O Benvenuto!’ he said, ‘your work is spoiled; and no power on earth can save it now.’” Cellini then rushed to the foundry and through direct action saved the casting: “When I saw I had raised the dead, in despite of all those ignorant sceptics, such vigour came back to me, that the remembrance of my fever and the fear of death passed away from me utterly.” This new use of casting allowed for a more realistic, vital medium, challenging the lifeless form of marble. This offered new possibilities and artistic means of interpreting and representing the world.

To turn to ed tech, new technological developments in this field similarly have embedded within them the seeds of sexism and result in reinforcing existing power structures. For example, open source provided a new method of developing software based upon community contributions and distributed tasks and roles. However, it has a distinct problem with sexism (Cuen, 2017), and many women have left the field prematurely. This has been attributed partly to how some of these communities have been founded, with accusations of sexism against key open source figures such as Linus Torvalds (Vaughan-Nichols, 2015) and Richard Stallman (Levy, 2019). What could have been established as an environment quite different from the commercial one in fact ended up reinforcing the same social norms regarding women. We see a similar story in the gaming world and online in social media, with an Amnesty International report in 2018 finding that Twitter is a toxic environment for women: “The company’s failure to meet its responsibilities regarding violence and abuse means that many women are no longer able to express themselves freely on the platform without fear of violence or abuse.”

In terms of digital scholarship, then, one important lesson from this metaphor is that creation, and technological development, no matter how impressive, do not occur in a vacuum and carry assumptions and embedded social values. When we promote the use of digital scholarship, these issues need to be recognized. The experience of using Twitter, for example, is not the same for a white man as it is, say, for a woman of colour.

The second interpretation of Cellini’s statue is to view Medusa more straightforwardly as a monster of our own making. When we look into its eyes, we are made inhuman. This is an obvious metaphor for the dark side of the internet. We created this platform, but for all of its potential and positive elements we have also unleashed the monster of trolling, misinformation, the alt-right, bots, and interference in democratic processes. Although a considerable amount of responsibility lies with the platforms and the algorithms that they deploy to promote extremist views, it is also true that people write and distribute this content (mostly) and that social media have revealed the dark side of humanity. But Perseus can be seen as hope, in this sense, that the monster can be defeated by reflecting its gaze back at it. The role of education is to act as the shield of Perseus in this respect, to develop literacies, tools, and communities that use the communicative power of the internet as the means to take power away from the trolls.

The third interpretation in relation to digital scholarship regards the famous blood of Perseus, which pours viscerally from the severed head. Cole (1999) devotes an article to the discussion of the portrayal of this blood, deemed shocking at the time, the horror film of its day. The simultaneously realistic and excessive representation of blood flowing from the head and neck posit the viewer at the moment of death, the transition from the living state. The blood “reveals what life drains from the face and the limbs,” as Cole (p. 218) puts it. In this, Perseus reminds us what death really means. This continual connection to reality, to what our actions mean and their consequences, is often lacking in much of the ed tech industry. How algorithms manifest themselves in people’s everyday lives and their impacts on society are often greeted with a shrug. Needed is a constant reminder, like Cellini’s blood, running through software coding sprints and venture capitalist huddles. It is the social impact of ed tech in which we need to be grounded.

Digital scholarship presents many opportunities and challenges for educators. This metaphor relates to how new technology gives the appearance of a different set of values, like Cellini’s dynamic bronze method of casting compared with marble, but it can still replicate and reinforce existing power structures. For academics, digital scholarship potentially offers a means to reinterpret or circumvent existing systems. For example, a widespread reputation online can be gathered through contributions rather than hierarchical structures, so in theory a PhD student can have as big an influence as a tenured professor. This is certainly true in many respects, but equally true is that the new technologies can reinforce the existing hierarchies. Stewart (2016) noted that establishing an online identity increases visibility for pre-tenure academics, and the increased network and impact offer some protection in a climate of precarious academic labour. She found that, “among the junior scholars and graduate students in the study, opportunities including media appearances, plenary addresses, and even academic positions were credited to . . . online visibility.” However, researchers are also increasingly identifying the negative aspects of networked scholarship. Stewart commented that “network platforms are increasingly recognized as sites of rampant misogyny, racism, and harassment.” For all of their potential to democratize the online space, social networks frequently reflect and reinforce existing prestige, with higher-ranked universities having more popular Twitter accounts (Jordan, 2017a) and professors generally developing larger networks than other positions in higher education (Jordan, 2017b).

Selwyn (2015, p. 68) argues that engaging with digital impacts on education in a critical manner is a key role of educators: “The notion of a contemporary educational landscape infused with digital data raises the need for detailed inquiry and critique.” This includes being self-critical and analyzing the assumptions of and the progress in movements within digital scholarship. For example, Gourlay (2015, p. 310) argues that open education, despite its ideological position of being anti-hierarchical, can in fact reinforce existing structures, perpetuating “a fantasy of an all-powerful, panoptic institutional apparatus.”

As with Cellini’s Perseus, there is a paradox within digital scholarship, a new technology that allows for a different type of creation but simultaneously represents and reinforces existing structures. Recognizing that the technology alone will not address these issues and ensuring that their possible advantages are realizable for all is a duty for those who engage with them.

The Rebecca Riots and Open Access Publishing

To consider recent developments in open access publishing, particularly Sci-Hub and #ICanHazPDF, I will use the rather obscure metaphor of rural riots in 19th-century Wales. Sci-Hub, taking its inspiration from file-sharing sites for movies such as Pirate Bay, aims to provide free access to academic publications, bypassing publisher paywalls and copyright restrictions. It was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, a student in Kazakhstan frustrated by the lack of access to scientific publications. As Bohannon (2016) reports, it is not just people in poorer countries who access Sci-Hub. As library budgets are restricted and deals with publishers become more expensive, access to many journals for those in academia is restricted. For those who do not have access to a university library, conducting research can necessitate asking others to send them required PDFs. It is also often cumbersome to access different publisher databases, and Sci-Hub offers a convenient single location. #ICanHazPDF is a more distributed approach to bypassing paywalls and gaining access to papers. In this model, someone uses the #ICanHazPDF hashtag on Twitter to request a PDF of an article that they cannot access, and often an academic who has the appropriate access will send them the required file (Gardner & Gardner, 2015). Sci-Hub has faced legal challenges and accusations of criminal activity, including hacking people’s accounts. But whether it is Sci-Hub, #ICanHazPDF, or some other method, they illustrate active resistance by academics to the paywalls put in place by publishers to restrict access.

Turning to the metaphor of civil unrest in 19th-century Wales, the Rebecca Riots, as they were known, were a series of protests and disturbances in southwest Wales in the period 1839–1844. The target of the protests was usually toll gates, where anyone passing by had to pay a toll to use the road. During the riots, these toll gates were demolished by large crowds during night raids. The toll gates were seen as a symbol of a wider series of grievances, but practically they also affected the lives of farmers. The leader of the rioting crowd would be dressed in women’s clothes and be referred to as Rebecca, although who fulfilled this role varied depending on location. The origin of the name was biblical, from a passage in Genesis 24:60 (KJV): “And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.” Over 200 such incidents occurred during this period, causing the government to mobilize the army and extra police. They were largely ineffective in preventing the protests, however, since the movement had popular local support, and retribution was threatened against informers.

The authoritative account of the Rebecca Riots is that of Williams (1955). Although the riots can be interpreted as a straightforward protest against an increase in the number of toll gates and their respective tolls, which had a particularly damaging effect on farmers who needed to transport lime to improve soil, Williams provides a comprehensive account of the multiple causes that led to the riots. These causes included a decaying gentry system that did not represent the people, a language barrier, poor treatment by the judiciary, a lack of agricultural innovation that depleted the soil, the strong Methodist non-conformist influence, and perhaps most significantly extreme poverty. This combination of factors created the environment in which the increase in tolls proved to be a catalyst for protest.

The 1844 report of the Commission of Inquiry for South Wales, established to examine the causes of the disturbances, identified five contributing factors. In general, although there was some criticism of the rioters, the commission interpreted their actions as arising from an intolerable set of conditions.

To return to Sci-Hub, then, and other acts of rebellion against proprietary access to academic publications, there are a number of interesting parallels. Although we can criticize a specific form that this reaction takes, as with the Rebecca Riots, a number of factors have accumulated over time to make some form of rebellion almost inevitable. Of course, an academic unable to access a paper is very different from 19th-century poverty-stricken farmers, but some of the grievances are similar.

First, the riots in Wales occurred when the toll owners became excessively greedy. Until that point, farmers had paid a reasonable toll, but a toll was increasingly interpreted as an easy means of increasing profit. Some farmers had to go through three tolls within the space of 100 metres or so—if they then had to return to fetch lime for the soil, that was six tolls just to undertake their work. Similarly, in publishing, there have been increased efforts to extract large profits. The introduction of “big deals” by which publishers sell access to a bundle of journals costs European universities (ultimately funded by taxpayers) over €1 billion annually (Kelly, 2019), profit margins of up to 40% that are unknown in almost any other industry (Buranyi, 2017), and increased costs, for example when Elsevier raised its prices by 50% in 1994 (Buranyi, 2017).

Second, the toll owners were often absent, English, and uncaring—any connection between the gentry and the local population had been lost. This reflects the decaying relationship between academics and publishers, and what was once seen as mutually beneficial and supportive is now viewed as remote, highly commercialized, and predatory. This is no longer a collaborative relationship but an increasingly exploitative one. Given such conditions, it is little surprise that many academics have few qualms about sharing a PDF via Twitter.

Third, there was sufficient local support for the Rebecca Riots to flourish without reprimand. Undoubtedly, there was intimidation involved to stop people from informing, but generally the movement was successful because the local population was sympathetic to it. Fearing an uprising similar to that in Ireland, the British government of the time was most afraid of this popular support. In academic terms also, the practice of sharing articles is now seen not as something done by a rebellious or technical clique with a strong belief in the right to free information but as something widely supported by general practice.

Fourth, the farmers in Wales were responding to the changing economic climate around them. They were missing out on the benefits of the industrial revolution (e.g., transportation links bypassed them), working soil that was increasingly of poor quality and facing the imposition of a draconian new Poor Law. Although obviously very different in degree, academics on increasingly precarious work contracts, operating in an austerity-driven economy, and threatened with excessive punishment for breaching copyright are feeling similarly aggrieved and less likely to look generously on wealthy publishing corporations. As Muscatelli (2020) highlights, researchers believe that they are working in a toxic culture: “78% of researchers think that high levels of competition are creating unkind working conditions, while 57% warn of a long-hours culture.” This might not relate to open access publishing specifically, but it means that researchers are already stressed and disgruntled, so their enthusiasm for protecting the large profits of publishing houses is likely to be limited.

The message here is that, when suppression failed, ultimately the authorities were forced to concede that the grievances were valid, and a more equitable arrangement was established. Tolls are pinch points in historical change, and we are witnessing this now in the digital era. It can be difficult, confrontational, and even risky, but as one witness said of the Rebecca mob that descended on a toll it is a romantic and fearful sight.

Hidden Labour and Hunter-Gatherers in Open Practice

In this section, I explore how the field of anthropology overlooked and undervalued the role of women in hunter-gatherer societies. The two methods that I explore represent a form of hidden labour not recognized or valued because of the metrics used, and in this there is some resonance with certain types of tasks performed in digital, open practice.

In 1966, an anthropology symposium examining research on hunter-gatherer societies was convened under the title “Man the Hunter.” The title was revealing in that the research generally focused on the role of men in such societies and overemphasized the significance of hunting. The organizers of the symposium, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (1968), claimed that “man” referred to all humans and “hunter” to hunting and gathering, but the role of women and activities beyond hunting were largely absent. As Sterling (2014, p. 154) notes, “though the title ‘Man the Hunter’ was meant to be pithy and not to focus on men and only on hunting, this title demonstrated the biases of anthropology at the time: that men’s activities were the most important and illustrative of a culture, and that hunting is the most important subsistence activity of these societies.” This privileging of male activities was responsible for many of the subsequent theories that tried to claim “natural” differences between the roles that men and women undertake in society. For example, Washburn and Lancaster (1968, p. 303) claimed that “the biology, psychology, and customs that separate us from the apes—all these we owe to the hunters of time past. And for those who would understand the origin and nature of human behaviour there is no choice but to try to understand ‘Man the Hunter.’”

Hunting was seen as the primary source of food and the greatest value to such societies, and the dominant provision of food by men has been proposed as the basis for the nuclear family (Lovejoy, 1981). However, hunting is often not very productive, whereas foraging provides a regular, average intake, but it is not very visible. In contrast, hunting occasionally creates a very visible bonanza but with much higher variance. Perhaps the hunter’s neighbours benefit from hunting success because a kill produces more than can be consumed by one family. In this respect, societies find it useful to gain favour with hunters and thus reward them. This is the show-off hypothesis—hunting is not about acquiring more calories but about gaining status. This model suggests that women, however, avoid hunting because it “provides low unpredictable payoffs” (Gurven et al., 2009, p. 55).

There was a reaction to the dominance of men and the absence of women in the “Man the Hunter” approach, which led to a counter-symposium and collection entitled “Woman the Gatherer” (Slocum, 1975). Dahlberg (1981, p. 1) also used this title for an edited collection in which she set out how the conventional view was that “the demands of the hunt shaped the characteristics that make us human,” noting the claim that hunting required intelligence, upright walking, cooperation, language, and the ability to plan. Such accounts ignored or underplayed the role of women, and from the 1970s onward more detailed research began to reveal the extent and variety of women’s contributions in hunter-gatherer societies. Hiatt (1970) was one of the first anthropologists to stress that gathering was a more reliable means of obtaining food. Ironically, Lee (1968, p. 30), one of the organizers of the original “Man the Hunter” symposium, also presented research that demonstrated the importance of gathering, stating that “Plant and marine resources are far more important than are game animals in the diet.” In an analysis of the diet of the !Kung Bushmen of Botswana, he found that vegetable foods comprised 60%–80% and required 2–3 days, and this was largely undertaken by women. Men also took 2–3 days to hunt but produced less in that time.

Hunter-gatherer societies vary enormously, and there is no single fixed model; for example, sometimes there is no sexual division of labour, and other times there are clearly defined roles. However, this research revealed two factors that had influenced the majority of research in anthropology. The first factor was the prioritization of the contribution of the hunter to the group, and the second was that the type of artifacts examined and the investigations conducted were shaped by this view.

The type of closer analysis mentioned revealed that often the calories provided by hunting did not represent the majority of the group’s intake. The “gatherer calories” (also often small animal hunting) typically provided by women accounted for up to three-quarters of the overall intake. These calories were simply not regarded as important by the male researchers because of cultural values that they had brought to their research regarding what was significant. The contribution of women simply was not measured.

The second factor was that, following some erroneous reasoning about evolutionary psychology, it was proposed that men developed certain skills in order to hunt, such as having higher intelligence and being natural inventors. But, again, this was often a result of simply failing to look for women’s contributions. Their impact can be more subtle and thus harder to detect. For example, Conkey (2003) relates how the typical account of Inca politics focuses on the actions of men but that actually a key factor in Inca expansion was the increase in corn production, which allowed beer to be brewed. This was significant in political feasts, which supported Inca control and expansion. There is thus a complex relationship among gender, food, and politics. The inventions that could be attributed to women included bowls, means of food storage, digging tools, et cetera. Crucially, though, these types of inventions would often decompose, leaving no archaeological trace, whereas a sharpened spear point would remain. Zihlman (1978, p. 13) states that “a water container, for example, would have greatly increased the distance the hominids could travel on the savanna, freeing them from relying on streams and lakes for water” but that time destroys such artifacts. In this respect, the contribution of women literally became invisible in the historical record.

This is an oversimplification of the varied and complex research in anthropology, and I recommend Saini’s account (2017) for a good overview of the feminist issues (including women hunters), but it serves our purpose as an analogy, I hope. These two examples provide ways of considering what constitutes labour and the methods by which it is undervalued. The first type of work—gatherer calories—is ignored because it is not deemed important. The second type—invisible artifacts—is not seen because they are ephemeral. If we take the two as metaphors, then we can think about the type of labour in digital and open practice. For example, much of the output that constitutes digital scholarship is seen through blog posts, social media, and other more temporal forms. This is akin to gatherer calories, not deemed as worthy in the educational context as, say, one highly cited paper but in fact can contribute more to the overall academic discourse in that area.

There are also a number of support communities on Twitter and other networks. For example, a weekly tweetchat session was organized around the hashtag #LTHEChat by Chrissi Nerantzi, Sue Beckingham, and others in 2014 and is still operating now (Vasant et al., 2018). Similarly, the community that formed around the hashtag #PhDChat provides a global support network for PhD students (Ford et al., 2014), with much of the convening and organizing undertaken by women. Such communities do much of the heavy lifting for professional development in the open, digital space beyond that offered by an individual’s own institution. However, like the invisible artifacts mentioned above, this labour remains largely unseen, often because those who make decisions about reward and recognition do not inhabit these spaces. It is also often the case that women do much of these two forms of labour in digital, open spaces, and in education more generally much of the emotional labour falls to women (Bellas, 1999). This category of work is also disproportionately undertaken by early career researchers, academics on precarious contracts, and many of those professionals that Whitchurch (2008) describes as occupying the Third Space, for example educational technologists. These are all categories whose contributions are undervalued and can remain unrecognized within formal structures. Bali (2015) talked about a pedagogy of care and then reinforced it in relation to COVID-19 (2020). In the pandemic, expressing care and support, particularly for vulnerable students, is a vital component of what it means to provide education, and this kind of labour is more often undertaken by women, and it is not easily recognized within formal metrics. “Care” is not a quality that surfaces in many key performance indicators.

The first step in addressing this, I suggest, is to recognize that gatherer calories–type activities in higher education and digital scholarship are valuable; the second step is to find ways to bring to the surface the invisible artifacts–type contributions so that they are seen and noted. This can be realized through more narrative forms of promotion, a wider range of outputs considered for tenure, and encouragement in journals or at conferences to publish or present papers on these topics. It can also be realized by recognizing the impacts of other forms of hidden labour; for example, during the pandemic, the number of academic articles published with women as the first authors has declined significantly (e.g., Andersen et al., 2020). One can conjecture that this has been an effect of the increased pressures of care (children not in school, elderly parents, etc.) falling unevenly on women. In response, the FemEdTech collective (2020) called on editors to take action, such as promoting gender balance by inviting authors and being flexible with deadlines.

In 2012, I proposed a number of ways in which digital scholarship could be recognized in the process of promotion and tenure.

• Recreate the existing model by adding a layer of peer review to blog-like practices or making conventional journals more open.
• Find digital equivalents for the types of evidence currently accepted in promotion cases.
• Generate guidelines that include digital scholarship and set out broad criteria for assessing the quality of scholarly activity.
• Use metrics or statistical calculations to measure impact or influence.
• Remove or lower the significance of peer-reviewed publication,
• Award “micro-credit” for activity such as a blog post that attracts a number of comments and links (though to a lesser degree than a fully peer-reviewed article).

Similar approaches can also be adopted to recognize and promote the type of hidden labour in open practices, particularly when that labour has a direct impact on an institution’s effective functioning. However, open practice itself can be seen as reinforcing privilege because, as Bourg (2018) highlights, “for marginalized people especially—a very real danger of being open on today’s internet is the danger of being targeted for abuse, and harassment, for rape and/or death threats, and the danger of being doxxed.” This creates the danger of promoting this kind of activity and thus forcing people to take part in it who might face such threats. Singh (2015, p. 35) emphasizes that “the people calling for open are often in positions of privilege or have reaped the benefits of being open early on.” Thus, any attempt to recognize and value hidden labour needs to ensure that it does not end up paradoxically creating an environment that further marginalizes some actors. I examine this type of tension in the following section.

Liminal Spaces and Digital Scholarship

There is a tension at the heart of digital scholarship that can be summarized as “digital scholarship should count, but we don’t want to count it.” Bowles (2019) makes the point that, if we value certain behaviours in higher education, then we should recognize them; for example, valuing ethical behaviour by institutions is encouraged by tables such as the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (Bothwell, 2018). This is based upon metrics reflecting the UN Sustainable Development Goals and measures aspects such as gender equality, climate action, and well-being. This argument has relevance for digital scholarship in what is counted and how it is measured.

As I argued in the section on hidden labour, much of the work that might constitute digital scholarship is often not valued because it is not recognized in the same way as traditional outputs such as books and articles. What digital scholarship and open educational practice concepts have in common is the use of online technology to engage in scholarly practice, which often occurs in addition to traditional scholarly practice. Costa (2016) argues that digital scholars need to adopt a “double gamers” strategy by which they slowly implement cultural changes to practice while engaging in traditional practice to remain relevant within their institutions. There are sometimes benefits of digital scholarship that have traditional recognition or consequences; for instance, Stewart (2016) identifies benefits such as “media appearances, plenary addresses, and even academic positions” that participants credited to their digital scholarship practices. However, much of the work undertaken in digital scholarship is unrecognized and unrewarded. One solution, therefore, is to recognize and count it in the way that higher education measures everything else, including the Teaching Excellence Framework, the Research Excellence Framework, an author’s h-index, university rankings, and so on.

This leads to the dilemma highlighted at the start of the chapter. In a distinctly neo-liberal environment, if the types of academic labour that many digital scholars undertake are to be recognized, then such activities need to be made explicit. But it is also true that any such measurement establishes behaviours that deliberately seek to improve any metrics, which themselves create anxiety and pressure in the system. Counting and measuring such activities would also remove much of the appeal of alternative outputs for academics and constrain the freedom that they currently enjoy. For example, imagine if producing a set number of blog posts, acquiring a certain number of Twitter followers, or achieving a requisite number of views was linked explicitly to promotion or financial reward. This system would quickly become gamified and probably be even more stressful than current citation-chasing metrics related to publications. And as seems to be inevitable, any formalization of the system ultimately would benefit existing power structures and not the people whom initially it might have intended to reward.

The concept of liminality might provide a means of thinking about this tension. Liminality is concerned with transition from one state to another; for instance, Van Gennep (1960) proposed that rites of passage act as liminal processes in which the individual transitions to a new world. Building upon this work, Turner (1969, p. 95) described liminal entities “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Liminal spaces, therefore, are those that operate “betwixt and between” defined spaces, for example stairwells, hallways, and car parks. Preston-Whyte (2004, p. 349) writes of the beach as a liminal space: “The beach is a place of strong magic, . . . a space that is neither land nor sea, a zone of uncertainty that resonates with the sound of everchanging seas, a setting that is, by turns, calm, tranquil, and soothing or agitated, unruly, and frightening.”

As such, liminal spaces and practices are often concerned with transition from one state to another. In mythology, however, liminal spaces are not necessarily valued for an individual becoming something else: that is, there is no desired end state after the transition. Instead, they are revered as spaces that operate at the thresholds of worlds—the betweenness itself is valued. For instance, in the Welsh folktale of the Mabinogion (Guest, 1848), liminal spaces are those that connect to the otherworld. In the First Branch, Pwyll sits on a mound that “whosoever sits upon it cannot go thence, without either receiving wounds or blows, or else seeing a wonder” (p. 80). He sees and meets the mythical Rhiannon, who will become his wife as a result. The mound acts as the liminal space here between worlds, and it is valued for that otherworldliness, for operating between two spaces but being distinct from both of them.

The practices of digital scholarship such as writing blogs or networking through social media can be seen as constituting a liminal space: that is, a space between formal and informal, simultaneously outside and inside the university. Oravec (2003) suggests that blogs occupy a “middle space” between face-to-face and online education. Wood (2012, p. 96) proposes blogs as a liminal space for student teachers, in which blogging “is a process leading to fundamental change in the person undergoing the initiation, as their view of the world is altered while they are given time to consider both social and personal difficulties and beliefs and to learn from ‘elders’ who themselves have gone through the rite of passage.” Purdy and Walker (2013, p. 11) suggest that composition classes (which can be akin to blogging) allow for the construction of new identities, which help to create a liminal space that aids transition because “higher education attempts to create a boundary between itself and the ‘outside world.’”

Taking these perspectives on liminal spaces, then, it is possible not to surrender digital scholarship to the machinations of rigorous measurement and still recognize that such scholarship requires real labour to be effective. To do so, we should seek to establish “liminal spaces” within our institutions and workloads. That is, there is work that can be recognized as valuable, just as the burial mound is revered in the folk tale, but this respect means that we do not seek to excavate it and examine it too closely. How this would work exactly needs careful negotiation; many universities still have some notion of “research time,” so perhaps there is value in allowing digital scholarship to be recognized as a valid component of that without then imposing strict metrics to it. I concede, however, that it is not without risk, and sometimes the transitions in liminal spaces are not always welcome ones. As Waite et al. (2013, p. 61) put it, liminal spaces “may also be troublesome as personal identity shifts in an attempt to reach new understanding as old ways of doing and thinking about things are discarded.” There will be some inevitable discarding through the process of digital scholarship while ensuring that what remains is useful and valid.

Hussites and Guerrilla Research

In this section, I address a particular aspect of digital scholarship: namely, the impact on the means by which research as a whole can be undertaken in a networked society in which data and resources are abundant and the means of dissemination are open. Much of what we recognize as research is determined by the scarcity of data and control over routes of dissemination such as journals. Although traditional modes of research are still, and will remain, significant, the digital era provides an opportunity both to conduct research in different ways, using new methods, and to reimagine what we consider to constitute scholarly research. For those of us grounded in academia, our view of research has been formed by the approaches to resource scarcity, so it can be difficult to conceive of different perspectives. This is where metaphor provides us with a useful tool, and the one that I use here relates to a 14th-century Czech priest to make it as distant from our target domain as possible. The story of the priest, Jan Hus, is interesting in itself, so we will commence with that and then turn to its relevance for digital scholarship and research.

Hus was born around 1372, and he later argued for reform of the Catholic Church through his public preaching and his writing. He was one of the main influences on Martin Luther and has been seen as one of the primary reformers before the Reformation. His main arguments were summarized in his 1413 tract De ecclesia, which proposed that the word of God should be preached freely and in common languages, that everyone (who was baptised) was a member of the church, that the rich should give their wealth to the poor, and that people should not pay for elaborate burials. Perhaps most radically, Hus “gave the laity the choice whether or not to obey priests, saying that they should acknowledge only those priests who lived holy lives” (Klassen, 1990, p. 261). This choice extended to the pope, and people could question any clergy whom they deemed not to be leading a holy life, including the accumulation of wealth. His policies “made the people sovereign” (Klassen, 1990, p. 261).

Although his teachings were popular with the poor in Bohemia, they were not well received, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the church and the pope. Hus was excommunicated by a papal bull and put into exile, and renowned Hussite scholar Fudge (2013, p. 2) states that he “had been judged unworthy of humanity and expelled from the Christian community. Should he die, he had no right to a proper religious burial; his corpse was considered fit only to be discarded. . . . Whoever might touch him, whoever dared speak to him or attempt to give him any assistance whatever ran the risk of criminal prosecution leading to a similar fate. He was cursed and without human remedy.” Hus was tried at the Council of Constance, where he refused to recant his views and was convicted for heresy and burned at the stake in 1415.

After his death, his followers became known as the Hussites. They refused to recognize the pope and formed around a set of beliefs known as the Four Articles of Prague, which continued the arguments about preaching freely, anti-elitism, and anti-wealth. The Hussites would go on to be a formidable fighting force, aligned with Czech nationalism and defeating five papal crusades in the Hussite Wars. They are credited with developing an early version of the tank, the war wagon, a reinforced peasant cart with planking from which guns could be fired through slots.

It is easy, particularly in a short section, to make broad generalizations about Hus and the Hussites, portraying them as a kind of utopian force. For example, Hus was not the first to start public preaching and using a native language, rather than Latin, and it is overly simplistic to think of Hussites as a single entity, for the group was composed of many different factions with a range of views. Hus is sometimes portrayed as a proto-Marxist, and there are certainly elements of that in his calls for the redistribution of wealth. Fudge (1998, p. 25) argues that this too is an oversimplification, noting the common belief that “the Hussite Revolutionary Movement essentially comprised a social and economic struggle against the exploitation of late medieval Feudalism,” but he “finds the Marxist explanation wanting.” However, Klassen (1990, p. 249) argues for the legacy of Hus in modern thinking, concluding that “ideas such as religious toleration, popular sovereignty, the dignity of the common man and the destructive powers of greed and violence all raised by the Hussites have survived within European civilization.” However, in the analogy that follows, it is worth bearing in mind the necessary simplifications that I have made.

In The Battle for Open (Weller, 2014), I proposed the idea of “guerrilla research” as an example of transformed practice that openness allows. Open practice in a digital, networked world allows us to rethink what academic research means, and this is where the link to the Hussites lies. We tend to think of research as comprising certain elements: it is often externally funded research, it produces a traditional output such as a journal article or book, it undergoes a pre-selection evaluation, and it is often in competition with other proposals. This attitude toward how research is conducted and what it looks like was shaped prior to the digital revolution, and though some of that conceptualization remains true many possibilities are opened up by new technologies and approaches. It is now possible to create your own journal, disseminate findings, interrogate open data, conduct open research, and analyze online resources all without research grants. None of these approaches should be seen as replacing traditional approaches to research. They are not superior to them but complementary.

What these new approaches have in common is that they do not require permission, except maybe in relation to time allocation. In his review of the film The Social Network, Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig (2010) pointed out that the removal of barriers to permission was the really significant part of the Facebook story: “What’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half a billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing.”

The same freedom applies to scholarly practice also, including how we conduct research, disseminate results, and teach. Unger and Warfel (2011) proposed the idea of guerrilla research in software development, and a similar lightweight approach can be adopted in academia. Guerrilla research has the following characteristics.

• It can be undertaken by one or two researchers and does not require a team.
• It relies on existing open data, information, and tools.
• It is quick to realize.
• It is often disseminated via blogs and social media.
• It doesn’t require permission.

Using open data, free tools, and social media for dissemination, then, people can undertake useful, impactful research that previously would have required funding and extensive data collection. This type of research can be conducted without permission, meaning that the methods and focus of research can be broadened beyond what is formally approved and funded. For instance, in the later section on rhizomatic learning, there is an article by Bali et al. (2016) that uses an auto-ethnographic approach to analyze the open course “Rhizo14.” Or, in the section on MOOCs, I referenced the completion rates analysis by Jordan (2014), which used openly reported MOOC completion rates, open access data visualization tools, and blogs to disseminate findings. These are two examples of research conducted on the basis of open tools, data, and practice.

In The Battle for Open (Weller, 2014), I set out how the current research model is wasteful of time and money, but it goes unremarked on because it is accepted practice. One example is the development of research bids to funders. The majority of them are unsuccessful, yet they are often the results of months of work by a coalition of partners. In 2014, I estimated this at about 65 years of people time for the United Kingdom for just one funding agency, and competition for funding has only increased since then. This was just a “back of the envelope” figure, but it demonstrates the inherent waste of time and money in the current model. Much of the hard work in those bids is lost since they are not made openly available. This is not to suggest that the peer-review process is not valid but that the failure to capitalize on bids represents a substantial waste of resources. The point is to illustrate that, though guerrilla research might seem to be unappealing because it does not bring in external funding, in fact it might represent a more efficient use of resources by academics who have the skill, predilection, and appropriate subject area for working in this manner, but they are often forced to operate in the traditional funded model to gain recognition.

Many of these bids represent valid research but fail on technicalities related to the proposal format. A more open approach to research development would reduce the overall waste. The competitive nature of bidding often precludes the public sharing of bids, though, especially in the development stage, and as such it represents one of those areas of tension between open scholarship and traditional practice. Guerrilla research might represent a means of realizing some of the proposals, although in some areas, particularly science, it isn’t possible. For example, if a proposal is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on academic staff, then it might be based upon surveys, interviews, focus groups, a conference, and subsequent analysis. A guerrilla research approach, instead, might analyze Twitter sentiment on the hashtag #onlinepivot, review relevant blogs, examine different institutional statements, and publish the findings via a blog or self-hosted webinar. This would take considerable time to realize, which institutional policies would have to recognize, but it would not require the type of funding or legitimation of the first approach. It would produce different results, but they would be valid and of interest.

What has all this got to do with a 14th-century Czech priest? His premises were that the people did not need priests to relate to God, that everyone baptised formed part of the church, and that the papal hierarchy should be undermined. My intention here is to comment not on the theological argument but on the structures that grant permission for certain types of activity. For the Catholic Church in 14th-century Europe, one can read research councils in this analogy. They hold power and money, and they decide what is legitimate—the church in terms of what was valid holy practice, research councils in terms of what constitutes appropriate research. As in churches, there are significant rituals performed for research funding to demonstrate worthiness of benediction, but such a comparison is probably stretching the metaphor too far. More apt is the Hussite view that everyone is equally holy, and in my analogy this can be interpreted as everyone is their own research council. With more lightweight, open models of research, permission to conduct practice is not required, and dedicated buildings and structures are not always necessary either. The approval of a council is not always required to reach an audience.

My argument here is not to overthrow research councils, for they are still vital to certain types of research, but to propose that often there are low- to zero-cost alternatives available that might get at some of the research questions. They should be considered and valued by institutions as valid models of conducting research. But let’s leave the last word to a quote commonly attributed to Hus: “Love the truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.”

Music Metaphors

Music as a metaphor readily springs to mind for many, yet I am reluctant to engage with many such metaphors, largely because doing so often results in the unedifying sight of middle-aged men attempting to recapture their youth or demonstrate their street cred. But two metaphors in this genre are worth exploring because they highlight some of the possibilities of digital scholarship and are good examples of how metaphors can shape thinking.