am perhaps least of all Re: participants interested in having the group repurpose around more standard formats of academic exchange–invited speakers or conference-style presentations or papers or such. Although I still teach theatre history and dramatic literature as a visiting professor in the Theatre Department at SUNY New Paltz, I made a break from academics a few years ago and now work mainly outside of academics entirely (I partnered with another former academic in starting up a property inspection business that specializes in large estates and I also direct a non-profit community tennis organization with over 300 members). Insofar as keeping my toe dipped in academics, I still value teaching and working directly with students. I also still read some academic writing with interest and concern. But I find most standard forms of academic exchange (in the humanities, and in the literary field in particular) almost unbearable, both the modes of exchange, which I found exclusionary, competitive, and self-regarding, and the form, and indeed much of the content, of the discourse itself, which I found exclusionary, competitive, and self-regarding.
There are of course many exceptions to all this. And whatever my resistance and frustration with how we do what we do, many, many of the people in academics I’ve worked with are truly engaged, compelling people with great intellectual integrity and intentions who naturally share many of the same obvious complaints about conference formats, academic writing and ideas, department business, etc. Re: is, for me, a group of such people.
I’ve had moments in Re: exchanges–the retreat I hosted at my house in the Hudson Valley for our concept lab group; the first Oxford Protocols meeting; chatting with David Deutsch in a side group for a couple hours about reinventing the university as a parachute-zone–which got me thinking about what it would take to actually engage in real policy-making efforts or even full-scale, ground-up institution building. But, as we plot forward to our next exchange in NYC, we’re yet to reinvent our own group, let alone the university or knowledge production, dissemination, and reception more broadly.
My visions for the group have been digital of late. Is there some way to treat Re:’s varied success at experimenting with “formats and procedures for conversation as outputs in their own right” (Helge’s words), and then integrate those outputs into an online platform that people might actually use and do things with?
It’s been great to see people actively commenting on each other’s statements (during the last exchange) and on the 2011 Re: Report for the last Zoom meeting. Lack of content, and lack of active content, has been the road-block for building any substantial online version of Re: in the past. I’m never going to design a cool enough looking website to get people excited about going online instead of going on the Queen Mary or going to Oslo or Glasgow or NYC or wherever. But beyond the detour of debating whether Operating System is the right metaphor for what we want to organize and publish online, I would like to find some impetus before our next meeting to get something up online that we can work with moving forward, and that captures the work we’ve already done over the past 10 years.
The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has a website that does something that we could do, perhaps depending on how we answer some of the questions Dorian puts forward in his prompt.
Take a look at their “People” page:
There’s the simple fact that they have a People page with a list of members and participants, etc., something we just added to the Re: website. That list of Re: members and participants immediately gives the impression (correctly) of the considerable activity and reach of the project, regardless of its outcomes. I’d like to build on that.
The more unique feature is the way the MIT-IBM Lab incorporates tags as part of each persons brief write-up about what they do and how they relate to the Lab’s work. Click on those a tag like “Efficient AI” and the site loads a list of work (papers, projects, code, etc.) that relate to that area, both work that the Lab has produced and work that the Lab links to that it considers important to its project. Most items on that list have multiple other tags assigned to them as well, suggesting overlap with other areas of work. As per Helge’s mention of the trans-disciplinary ideals of the group, marking such overlap between/sharing of “methods and procedures” could be a way to get us thinking more proactively about that overlap/sharing.
Admittedly, the tags (or buttons) which are part of the People’s bios are mostly just broad subject area tags. Compare them to the “Touchstones” and “Exchange-Prompts” items in our Re:OS Directory (lefthand panel of the Re: homepage).
The Lab also has come up with a set of tags for “key technical themes” that gear their larger project. Check those out here:
These key themes are, if you squint, similar in kind to the Protocols that we already have in our Re:OS Directory. Click on a theme and you’ll see that the Lab has come up with a short, definite statement about each theme and why those themes are key to the Lab’s work. That’s how I understand the nature and purpose of the Re: Protocols.
Again, a list of work–both the Lab’s own, and outside work that the Lab wants to draw attention to–is presented in relation to each key theme. Click on a theme, and it sorts out work that is thematically relevant. Much work, of course, is relevant to multiple themes.
The other write-up you’ll see on the Lab’s Research page involves a set of “adjectives” that modify the project’s larger topic (AI) into more focused topics. The Re:OS Directory includes a set of four “actions” that, again, seem to serve the same purpose: if Re:’s topic is Knowledge, then focusing that topic through the lens of Production, Accreditation, Curation, and Dissemination is how the Re: Project can “focus on leading the next generation of knowledge creation for the betterment of knowledge itself” (paraphrasing the Lab’s mission statement).
My ask of the group: Can we take the items in the Re:OS Directory and write up some concrete, useable statements that express how we, as a group, understand these topics and themes and why our understanding of these key topics and themes is important to enabling our group’s work? If we can create that text, as we did for the Protocols, we’d have an organizing foundation for launching new exchanges, projects, prompts, etc.
Great ideas Bill … I’d be willing to help wrt your last paragraph – though I’m not sure that we as a group agree on terribly much, so I might phrase the ask differently. It is so expensive to maintain such a site – Id think we’d need to talk about getting some kind of endowment to keep it going.
The challenge, I think, is to create a platform that is participatory, not simply declamatory. I look at that IBM site and just wonder who has time–or interest–to engage with all of that? Helge’s comments about Re: being a forum for connecting, for exchange, and conversation feels relevant as a counterpoint. What is all of this elaborate apparatus for? In the case of IBM, it seems to be for promotion and publicity. Alternatives?
We can do this, and we should. Yes, it should be “participatory,” and that’s why I’m not worried about whether we “agree.” The writing of protocols is not a matter of agreement on issues but of the will to make something together–in this case to construct clear and precise explanations of both the “items” Re has generated over the past decade and the new ones that we are generating now (e.g. Lisa’s “failure” protocol).
More to follow.
Love your avowal of students, Bill. Do they not at the best of times personify and occasion the very trans-disciplinary orientation that Helge writes about in his comment?
Bill I share the sense of enervation you articulate at the outset here. But the following way of thinking has energised me somwhat:
Looking at all the histories of English on and around my desk, I was just thinking: if you wanted to write a history of our discipline over the last 30 years (a kind of sequel to all the extant histories), and if that history was intellectual, institutional and about the wider context/public facing of the subject, the theme would be: what is the relationship between English and knowledge.
Intellectual: end of theory; rise of historicism; rise of biography; digital humanities – these are all about different conceptions of knowledge; by contrast, the ‘applieds’ such as heath humanities, environmental humanities, these want to use an older, more traditional conception of English’s knowledge.
Institutional: teaching secondary and HE; like, what do we teach?
Public facing: what good is English? What skills? How relate to marketplace? What are the politics of English?
Underlying this is: what is the relationship between literature and knowledge (duh = Plato and Aristotle) But more importantly, How is that mediated by ‘doing English’?
English is supposed to turn ‘literature’ into ‘knowledge’, no? Does it still do this? And what does the answer to that question tell us?
I’m still intrigued by the idea of pushing forward on working together across trans-disciplinary groups, partly because that is central to what I have studied so long, and partly because of this group’s efforts (sometimes stunning success, sometimes failing forward. . ).
But most immediately because for much of this year I have been working with a group of lawyers, as an expert witness on the NY fair funding case. That has been intense and engaging intellectual work, with a common purpose–but across such wide differences in general modes, methods, vocabularies, and even citation habits.
And as was the case with the protocol production, sometimes the most useful knowledge work was discovering something that seemed obvious, elementary, or even taken-for-granted in one disciplinary space a) can come as a revelation, b) operates somewhat differently in its new context, and c) enables new connections, possibilities, and ideas into an unfamiliar field.
It is not easy work, and not instantaneous. . sometimes implication lightbulbs don’t turn on for days or weeks after a conversation. BUT, on a website with participation prompts and entryways, we could (Helge and Johanna) rethink time in productive ways?
Thanks Bill, for these really productive and practical suggestions. (Thanks too for all the work you’re doing on the site.). I’m new to Re. and very late in commenting here (major writing deadline last night), so just a few short thoughts before we start talking on Zoom.
I used the Re site a bunch in my two courses this year, one on climate change science fiction (grad.), and one on gothic novels. We had the protocols up many times in class. The close reading of them in connection to the material of the syllabus generated some great (as in both highly valued and scaled up) conversations. But found ourselves also looking for some clickable pathways outward/forward/backward to other relevant places on the Re. site, or maybe better, to work by members of the Re. group developing this or that subtopic in the protocol.
Latter prospect is how I read your interest in having is look at the Lab as a starting point for building out a Re. OS: develop the bios so they’re less “bio” and more connected across the protocols to the actual work?
My favorite protocol is the one fiction. In class this term, I found myself providing further references in my head and orally whenever I’d see a keyword: “realism,” “technique,” “futures.” Already these terms (and a lot of others being used in the Re. idiom) are floating through the prompts and comments before us today (5/20). I imagine hyperlinks within the protocols working out from and across what’s happening w/ us individually and collectively would be really useful. Cliff talks about enabling restraints, which makes good sense. The hyperlinking would allow those restraints to be creatively adjusted and experimented with in real time.
I’d be happy to help w/ this.