I’ve just fin­ished a sec­ond enjoy­able day at the Text Cre­ation Part­ner­ship Col­lo­quium here in Ann Arbor. Indi­vid­ual obser­va­tions and links to inter­est­ing research will be forth­com­ing as I wind down, but there’s one thing I have to note imme­di­ately, just to offload it from my head:

There were innu­mer­able themes and pre­dic­tions vet­ted in the talks, mainly cen­ter­ing on the effect of EEBO-​​TCP and related elec­tronic resources for research. Changes in the con­duct of research. Changes in the planned expan­sion and inter­faces of data­bases. Adjust­ments in the social dynam­ics of pub­lish­ing, the markup of data, the estab­lish­ment of stan­dards. Shifts and adap­ta­tions from the librar­i­ans work­ing in insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing. Deep enhance­ments and accel­er­a­tion of tra­di­tional aca­d­e­mic research tech­niques, which will push the schol­arly dis­course towards new untram­meled fron­tiers of stren­u­ous scrib­bling and yam­mer­ing, and the fund­ing thereof. That sort of thing.

In every talk, the fram­ing and open ques­tions cen­tered on four groups of peo­ple: Stu­dents. Fac­ulty. Librar­i­ans. Pub­lish­ers. What can pub­lish­ers do to bet­ter serve their fac­ulty users? What can librar­i­ans do to bet­ter train stu­dents to use these resources? How will fac­ulty direct librar­i­ans to com­mu­ni­cate with pub­lish­ers about what they need for their stu­dents’ research? And so forth.

Not once—though I con­fess I missed half a day yes­ter­day, but doubt I missed the term in use—not once did any­body men­tion the pub­lic.

Not one god­damned word about the peo­ple who pay for this all. I make myself sound like a Cham­ber of Com­merce Mem­ber by say­ing it that way, but no mat­ter how you slice it: reg­u­lar peo­ple foot the bill, but are not encour­aged to join in this invig­o­rat­ing four-​​way con­ver­sa­tion, nor for that mat­ter play a role in the mar­ket of ideas, pub­lished works, schol­arly effort and the [vast amounts of] money that com­pro­mise those groups’ interactions.

The world of schol­ar­ship can be abstruse, eso­teric, and overly refined; while it is (arguably) col­le­gial within the Ivory Tower, it’s not par­tic­u­larly known for its gen­eral util­ity beyond those walls. One read­ing of the social con­tract that under­lies American-​​style Uni­ver­sity fund­ing could be: We’ll pay for the place, and the sup­port­ing infra­struc­tures for research and the Life of the Mind, as long as you teach these damned kids and don’t pester us with the details of your work too much.

But I would like to know how it came about that “don’t pester us with the details of your work,” has trans­formed into “lock your source mate­ri­als and work behind a fire­wall and never let us see it.” Even as a Townie, I could pay $350 and go check books out of the phys­i­cal U-​​M library sys­tem; even as a Townie I could sit at a ter­mi­nal in a library build­ing and access their search­able data­bases; even as a Townie I could attend on-​​site sem­i­nars; even as a Townie I was able to but­ton­hole fac­ulty friends and old col­leagues and chat occasionally.

I could do none of those things from home. I need to go there. A Uni­ver­sity is sup­posed to be phys­i­cal. It’s a loca­tion. A place.

Maybe you see where I’m going. That place I’m going is the place we’re all going: It’s the place I’m sit­ting right now, and you’re sit­ting as you read this. The two ends of a “series of pipes”. The network.

The cul­ture of the Acad­emy — though I have been immersed in it for decades now, and (to be frank) respect many of its indi­vid­ual mem­bers above all other human beings — the Acad­emy as an insti­tu­tion with its inward-​​facing cul­ture never ceases to amaze by its ridicu­lously blind self-​​appraisals and assumptions.

We talked for two days about the effect that the new elec­tronic archives and net­worked schol­ar­ship will have on the prac­tices of schol­ar­ship, preser­va­tion, ped­a­gogy, and pub­lish­ing. Blah-​​de-​​incremental-​​blah. While there was an under­stand­ing of the impor­tance of these huge archives, and the impact that improved access and avail­abil­ity will have inter­nally on the sys­tem of four major aca­d­e­mic play­ers, nobody seemed to con­sider one cru­cial thing.

These resources are no longer geo­graph­i­cally iso­lated. They’re in the sys­tem of pipes. Even­tu­ally, depend­ing on either dra­con­ian licens­ing agree­ments or the dili­gence of lay com­peti­tors, they’re becom­ing avail­able to the lay public.

They’re. On. The. Net­work. Not in a big impres­sive phys­i­cal brick ivy-​​covered library. They’re online. In everybody’s home.

And when that has finally hap­pened—while that is hap­pen­ing—the fifth and silent player will cease to be an innocu­ous bill-​​paying bystander. The lay pub­lic will become a core par­tic­i­pant. Or competitor.

For­get ARPA: You and I, right now, are using a novel nonaca­d­e­mic chan­nel for dis­course, schol­arly and oth­er­wise. For­get Pro­Quest and ECCO and EEBO: We see online already innu­mer­able efforts aimed at col­lab­o­ra­tive archiv­ing and pro­duc­tion of author­i­ta­tive his­tor­i­cal and genealog­i­cal texts out­side the Acad­emy. The bar­ri­ers to entry for pub­lish­ing are dis­ap­pear­ing, as wikis and Lulu​.com and every other damned Web thing drags the power of mov­able type out of the clenched blue hands of the North­ern Euro­pean fam­i­lies that cor­nered the mar­ket cen­turies ago.

The fun­da­men­tal effect that will come with pub­lic net­work avail­abil­ity of schol­arly raw materials—whether that access is granted by the mon­eyed stake­hold­ers, or comes from side­step pro­duc­tion of novel con­tent by the lay pub­lic—has not yet been dis­cussed. Net­worked elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions evap­o­rate the costs of pro­duc­tion and redis­tri­b­u­tion to make “books” (what­ever they are) and “con­ver­sa­tions” (what­ever they are) free like beer, enabling inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tion, inde­pen­dent schol­ar­ship, inde­pen­dent ped­a­gogy and discussion.

We didn’t talk about that, in all of two days sup­pos­edly focused on those very sub­jects. The word “pub­lic” did not enter into the equa­tion at all. Why not? Maybe because I was sit­ting next to the only per­son in the room who is not a mem­ber of one those four classes of academic.

My wife is one of those pub­lic peo­ple, the ones who will shat­ter the con­nec­tions between and bar­ri­ers around that centuries-​​old four-​​way club. Not inten­tion­ally; not out of mal­ice. As a con­se­quence of her strength, intel­li­gence, curios­ity and dili­gence. She, and all the thou­sands of other unwit­ting mem­bers of the inde­pen­dent, edu­cated, curi­ous, intel­li­gent, uncre­den­tialled net­worked lay pub­lic will shat­ter the sys­tem… by acci­dent. By access. By break­ing its boundaries.

None of the tra­di­tional play­ers seem to know this yet. Some­day soon they’ll fig­ure it out. One way or another. Net­work effects have a ten­dency to crys­tal­lize sud­denly, as if from thin air. They catch every­body by sur­prise, when they hit.

You’d think his­to­ri­ans would catch on. That they might see the anal­ogy between the inven­tion of mov­able type, and the Net. Between the schol­arly tra­di­tions of the Church in Europe, and the mod­ern Uni­ver­sity. That they might won­der about all those stat­ues of saints with their faces chipped off. In some sense, Gutenberg’s mov­able type did that. What will this thing here do?

The swerve at the end: As a potent cul­tural exper­i­ment, change one word above to its close syn­onym. Con­sider how the piece reads, exactly as writ­ten, and how you expect tenured fac­ulty, pub­lish­ers and IHE librar­i­ans to respond when they read it.

Now, change the phrase “the pub­lic” to “alumni” through­out. What happens?

What I can only describe as an impli­ca­tion of flag-​​waving hooli­gans atop smoul­der­ing ruins, and of knit­ting by a guil­lo­tine, gives way to one of sweater-​​clad silver-​​haired busi­ness­men prone to wav­ing foot­ball flags, and SUV-​​driving moth­ers will­ing to donate funds so their names can appear on a wall at the Botan­i­cal Cen­ter. Who is this edu­cated, curi­ous, schol­arly “pub­lic” who is shut out of the Acad­emy, but alumni of one insti­tu­tion or another?

How inter­est­ing that this notion of shared access and a “lay schol­arly com­mu­nity” becomes so much more palat­able, when it appears I’m sim­ply talk­ing about alumni: of those who have grad­u­ated with a higher degree from some­where, in some discipline.

I’m not just talk­ing about alumni, of course. But I could start there. It might be eas­ier to do so, if you find your­self play­ing an early role in the trans­for­ma­tion of the com­mu­nity of schol­ar­ship: point out that you’re not just any­body.