March 30: Kathleen Fitzpatrick on “Peer Review, Open Scholarship, and the Digital Humanities”

We are delighted that on Wednesday, March 30 we will be hosting Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Pomona College, who will speak on “Peer Review, Open Scholarship, and the Digital Humanities.”

Peer review is the sine qua non of the academy: we use it in nearly everything we do, and cannot imagine what scholarship would be without it. But for such a crucial component of the ways that we work, none of us are wholly satisfied with it, either. Moreover, conventional forms of peer review are often misaligned with the kinds of open scholarship being produced in the digital humanities. This talk takes a brief look at the history and the present criticism of peer review as a means of exploring its future, particularly as scholarly publishing moves increasingly online: what might peer review that took advantage of the reputation economies developed within networked communities look like, and how might it help scholarly communication flourish?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. She is author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (2006) and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, forthcoming from NYU Press. Planned Obsolescence was published using an experimental open peer review process by MediaCommons Press, a project of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, co-founded by Kathleen. She has published in journals including the Journal of Electronic Publishing, PMLA, Contemporary Literature, and Cinema Journal, and has blogged at Planned Obsolescence since 2002.

Kathleen’s talk is co-sponsored by The CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and the CUNY Digital Studies Group, in partnership with The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Time & Place: Wednesday, March 30, 2011, 6:30-8:30pm, Room 6417, CUNY Graduate Center

Tags | cunydhi, fitzpatrick, meeting