Academia.edu and Me

Shamefully, I must admit my weekly intake of academic reading has been steadily going downhill over the past two years. Not all of it was, however, entirely my fault. One of the biggest downsides of moving from the doctoral world, into that in-between that is postdoc hunting, has been the sudden choke of academic resources at my disposal. At the University of Edinburgh I would log into the library page, search for an article and have it delivered in pdf form, with little thought on my side. Lists upon lists of new resources were fed to me by email daily, in quantities I could barely hope to parse.

Now, it's all gone. An used academic text, with few exceptions, can cost alone up to all of my monthly income. I can count the databases I have access to on the fingers of one mangled hand: everything else is locked behind paywalls that, to me and undoubtedly other 'independent' early careers like me are simply unaffordable. Most of all, every search for scholarly material has suddenly turned into a disjointed hunt for free, pirated or public domain material, often at the expenses of breadth. Not to mention keeping up to date with current research.

Then came Academia.edu. Now don't get me wrong, I will be the first one to admit that the platform has many, many faults and shortcoming, some of them crippling. More or less anyone can sign up, and often I have been tricked by an interesting title only to dig up some 1000 words undergrad paper. The material's quality is largely fluctuating, and there is definitely an issue of disjointment as well: it would be difficult to argue that the papers collected under the 'digital humanities' tag accurately represent the current zeitgeist in the digital humanities (or maybe they do, through metrics I have no access to?). Nonetheless, the platform somewhat broadened the number of scholars I was aware of, including some souls around my own age; it provided valuable material on fringe topics official journals didn't seem to have time for; and, most of all, it allowed me to keep my academic gears running on no budget.

Then, I read today Gary Hall's short conference piece 'Shoud this be the least thing you read on academia.edu?' and the scales fell off my eyes. Or rather, they weren't there to begin with, but the article still made me take a second glance at the savior I had put so much stock into for the past two years. The argument can, very summarily, boiled down to: Academia.edu is a for-profit company just like any other, which is run by a CEO and is mostly exploited by a userbase which is committed to self-promotion, rather than free access and culture and justice for all - a kind of critique most late capitalism academic dwellers will be familiar with. This is all, perhaps, true: in years of presence on Academia.edu most of my contacts with peers have been 'silent': you watch my stuff, I watch yours, not a word of feedback is exchanged. Hardly what one would call a free and open, collaborative environment, no? All the while, Academia.edu likey collected vast amounts of data which have then been turned over to businesses I am not even aware of (which use the site actually does of gathered data is, to me, still somewhat nebulous).

Still, I think it might be a bit too early to throw away the baby along with the bathwater. On the same day, I have also read ' Me and my shadow CV' by Devoney Looser, which painfulyl reminded me of the rather dire stage of my academic career I am currently into. With little to no resources at my disposal, no support from any acknowledged institution and rapidly deteriorating perspectives, it seems self-harmful to renounce such a resource on the basis of issue which, I realise now, seem rather abstract given my current day-to-day situation. A big part of my doctoral research, ironically, was a critique of free access to images as disguised marketing: now I come full circle and realise that whichever semblance of an academic activity I have kept up in the past two years is largely thanks to such 'exploiters', Academia.edu included. Sure, you can have my Facebook friends list - at least I can now get my hands on more than an open access paper a month.

The hardships of getting by while waiting for the golden rope of academia to descend upon me have made me reconsider the animosity I once had toward late capitalism's cultural market of 'free content for free data'. I still loathe it, yet I realise it is, for users like me, merely a matter of urgently using whichever tools are at one's disposal, even when this means relinquishing control over one's production of value.

To which I could add - Academia.edu doesn't pay me for the content and data I produce, but none of my 'RL' publishers do either. And I am still jobless. Where is the value?

Updates - Artribune and ICOFOM 2014

For interested parties: I had a short editorial piece published on Artribune about a very interesting initiative which intends to get closer Italian museums and the digital - TuoMuseo. Worth a read, although it's way too early to tell if the project will have any long-term meaningful impact on the - poor- way Italian museums face the digital.

Also, it seems like the by now mythological article I wrote and presented for ICOFOM 2014 might actually come out before the end of the year. Definitely looking forward to that!