peer-reviewer round table response to ted riecken’s scholarly podcast, “Mapping the fit between research and multimedia: A podcast exploration of the place of multimedia within / as scholarship”
ANTHONY PARÉ: I do remember listening to the podcast and loved the idea of, you know…
TED RIECKEN: Well, and apologies for the [non-anonymized version]. They actually sent you the wrong version. You know, you both commented, “well, he said who it was so I couldn’t do it blind.” But I sent them an anonymized version where I bleeped out my name and institutions and I sent them the one for their review. They sent you not the anonymous one, so it was hard to do blind.
CARL LEGGO: But then, that does raise interesting questions about the whole blind peer review process, especially for certain kinds of work.
ANTHONY: Well, especially when you can hear the person’s voice.
CARL: And I thought we would have recognized your voice after a little while, right? Because it is a unique voice, and I would have almost certainly entered into that mellow, mellifluous tone and said, “oh, I know this person,” [laughter,] which is, you know, [what] happens sometimes in writing too, right? You’re reading something and, “oh, yeah, I know…”
ANTHONY: Sure, sure, sure.
TED: But the question, I guess, that Anila and Teresa are trying to answer is what’s the role of this kind of media in academic discourse or in research. And then you took it a step further, Anthony, when I answered it from a number of different perspectives or tried to, and [you made the] point that there’s a bigger, underlying question, and that’s “what’s the rhetorical purpose of this stuff?” We have the article and the chapter in the book to advance argumentation, but if we have something that’s not quite aiming to do that, then where does it fit? And what is the purpose of this sort of work? But then I suppose you can ask the same thing of your work [to CARL]. What is the purpose of crafting poetry? It’s to make a…
CARL: Especially, you know, including poetry in…ostensibly academic essays, so doing something hybridized, something that is different from the typical rhetorical norm. What I’m always keenly interested in, of course, is, you know, who establishes the discursive traditions and rules by which we conduct our work? And why do essays in academic journals all look so much the same? You know, I just received my latest issue of Educational Researcher from AERA,1 right? And these days, I’ll now open it up, look at the table of contents, and I think, “in the last ten, twenty years of my life, will I ever want to read any of these articles?” And if I think the answer is no, I just bluebox the journal. I know I can always find it again online anyway. But the thing is, the articles in the latest issue of ER are totally uninteresting to me [now], totally irrelevant to any work that I’m interested in. And so it may be something to do with, you know, the scholarship of education, but it’s the scholarship of education as perceived by others.
TED: You’re right, and I think that…
ANTHONY: I think that this is not an uncommon experience. I think that in a sense, we’ve come to the end of an era, a long, long era, really. In the English tradition it starts in the 1600’s, the recording of the Royal Society of the Natural Sciences or whatever it is. So the beginning of the academic essay, beginning of the academic article, is there. But I think we’ve come, for really good reasons, to the end of that kind of tradition because we are trying, in a world that’s gone multimodal and multi-literate, to keep a tradition that really grew up at a time when print was suddenly available and distribution was possible. But we’re now in a new world. And so, you know, you see this mushrooming of other venues, like the blog and even tweeting, academic tweeting. [Murmur — uh hum.] And I think that my question about, well, “what’s the purpose of it?” was not to suggest ever that there isn’t a purpose but to suggest that this new genre, this new forum and form is going to do different work than other things have done. And we were happy with the academic journal, I think, until recently because it did a particular kind of work, and the work satisfied the needs of the community and satisfied the needs of the members of the community for the advancement of knowledge. But there’s some need for new forms, otherwise it wouldn’t be springing up. What work will it do that’s different from [previously]? I think that’s really important. What your work, Carl, does always, I think, is it upsets the apple cart. You’re in the middle of an academic essay and suddenly there’s a poem. [CARL laughs.] So it’s a disorientation that serves a rhetorical purpose. It calls attention to the certain kind of thing that wouldn‘t be called [to] attention if it weren’t a poem. And I think that same thing with this notion of what a podcast does. I don’t know what the multimedia possibilities of an online journal like the McGill Journal of Education are. I don’t know where those possibilities are, where they go, but they’re going to go. They’re there. They’re starting to happen and I think it’s exciting. Yeah.
TED: And I think the editors raise an interesting question just by posing it in journal format, because we, you know, we’ve long had orthodoxies within this tradition that if we adhere to them so tenaciously, that the new blood coming in can’t relate to them. Then we’ll face the same kind of crisis of recruitment that the Catholic Church has faced in terms of, “who wants to be a nun?” “Who wants to be a priest?” Well, it doesn’t speak to the twenty-first century in a way that it might have three or four hundred years ago. So we’ve got the same sort of adjustments to make in terms of, “how do we communicate?” “What sort of media do we embrace?” “What do we credit and recognize as legitimate ways for people to put their thinking out there?”
CARL: I think the big deal is for folk our age to recognize that the digital literacies and media that are now available to us are only about a decade old. And so we’ve grown up through a bunch of decades when the technologies that were available were the technologies that we used. And so we might have felt a certain restriction around some of those technologies but what we accept is that, you know, this is what we can do. And now, of course, everybody is carrying a smartphone. And, of course, we’re a whole lot smarter now than we ever were without a smartphone [laughs] because of the capabilities of it in terms of camera, the photography, video recording, and access to and so on, you know. It’s astonishing what it has opened up for us. So, actually, now we have the technology to do things that, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago would’ve been incredibly expensive and far more time-consuming to have engaged with and probably would have involved, you know, using the resources and services of a lot of people with the technological expertise and high end equipment and so on. And now we actually have the equipment. I’m just not so sure — this for me is always a big issue — so now that we have the equipment, you know, will we know what to do with it? [laughs] Are we just going to use the smartphone, you know, like a pen?
ANTHONY: Yeah, and I think that the other issue, [of] course, is that systems of merit and the systems of assessment and the systems of promotion and review and all that remain very firmly in the grip of the people who favor print and favor prestige. So, you know, it’s all that we… I was at a faculty discussion the other night in which people were being encouraged to look at new ways of developing and distributing scholarship. But, you know, who’s going to tell a pre-tenure faculty member to take a chance and start publishing a blog rather than trying to get into, you know, a prestigious journal because then they’ll pay for it. And I think we’re at a moment now where, on the one hand, we need to break free from those kinds of ridiculous bean-counting exercises, like looking at impact factors that marginalize people working in new areas, in cutting edge areas. And also, favor [the rich], you know, the rich get richer, just makes the possibility of new journals and new forms or new genres within that community… [it] stops them from developing because there’s this power. So how do we break that down? How do we make it possible for someone to come up for tenure with a blog that’s been running for five years and gets, you know, 20,000 hits a year. That’s stunning. Way more than [any will] ever read any of that person’s articles, right? So how do we develop those responses that recognize and value that kind of work?
CARL: It’s tough.
TED: Yeah, yeah. How do we transform — the term I use in the podcast is the “coin of the realm” — how do we move from one recognized form of currency to something that has equivalence?
ANTHONY: Sure, exactly.
CARL: So we want an academic bitcoin.
TED: Yeah that’s right. Shifting from the British pound to the Euro. [Laughter.]
CARL: Yeah. We know what we want, but of course, that, it’s all going to be a very slow process. It’s interesting how often in university contracts for tenure and promotion there is a significant part of the contract that speaks to the value of creative and performative work. And I’ve just been reviewing a calling for another university, and, once again, it’s there. And it applies to this particular person who’s done a bunch of creative work. But I also know from sitting on lots of committees, personnel committees, that creative work is frequently not given the attention that it deserves, on the one hand, but also that the contract calls for it. Even when it’s in the contract, it is still frequently ignored by people who have no understanding of the works. So, in a way, I think that what McGill Journal [of Education] is doing here, now, is opening up possibility through the whole journal issue and through including your work, Ted. But I think the journal is opening up possibilities that could have significant consequences for other people down the road. But it’s going to be a relatively, probably going to be a relatively slow, conversation because — so we’ve got our smartphones, so within ten years, the technology has just, you know, so quickly changed and so on — but, of course, our traditions haven’t changed very much at all.
ANTHONY: No, they haven’t.
CARL: And really, they haven’t changed, probably, in decades and decades.
ANTHONY: Yeah… you know, one of the things, you know, the popularity of the TED Talks…
CARL: Yes.
ANTHONY: Now the TED Talks are just academics, most of them, talking. Doing mini lectures. How come our journals didn’t do that when they could have done, even ten years ago? That’s one of the things that we talked about when I was at the journal. We now have this open access online presence. We have YouTube channels, we have… there’s a way in which you could get people to... Carl Leggo reading his poetry as a, you know, something. It’s going to be slow to happen though. And like you, Carl, I can’t imagine how they, you know, how these review processes — we’re in the middle of one of course, I’ve got a colleague who is going up for a promotion — and the measure of quality measures, in a sense. And this is why it’s hard for them to recognize creative works. Number of citations. Somebody does a play or somebody does a performance. How are we going to measure that? What are the metrics, to use a word that is increasingly used in our lives. What metrics will we use?
TED: Well, and then it’s compounded by this slowness. We were talking, before you arrived, about the messiness of the democratic process, whether it’s review processes, or the multiple layers of input that we build into the university structure. [It] makes for a huge amount of engagement but it also makes for a very, very slow turnaround process or decision-making process. So, this case in point, you know, not with any criticism intended, but, you know, this podcast is probably close to eighteen months old now. If it didn’t have to go through this kind of review and editorial and refinement process, I could have hit publish on an RSS feed or on an iTunes account and it would be out there the next morning or that night. So we have a very slow to change, but also slow to decide, process.
CARL: Oh, absolutely. But again, see, we’ve gotten used to the slowness of the process, being well-seasoned academics. So we anticipate that we will always be submitting something new, something else that’s coming back for revision, something else is out there in the world being reviewed. As a poet, one time it took me eighteen years to get a poem that I really liked published. It would come back every year rejected, but I kept sending it out and in the eighteenth year, somebody finally published it, you know?
ANTHONY: The world had caught up with you, Carl.
CARL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wouldn’t give up on it, right? But isn’t it interesting, that as part of the culture of submitting poetry, I was willing to engage in a process where I simply… I never revised the poem. Always liked it the way it was. I looked at it every year wondering if I should revise, but no. I kept sending it out exactly the way it was. But we’re used to that. We’re used to doing things in very slow kinds of ways. But that’s not serving the role of scholarship in community contacts, in public dissemination. And so, it doesn’t serve… it doesn’t serve things there well at all, because the real value, I think, of the new technologies, the new media, is immediacy. And so I want what some have called a “telemediacy,” right? that we can speak to issues relatively quickly and not that we are producing the work quickly. The work is coming out of a lifetime of commitment and reading and writing and so on. But that, you know, we can actually get work out there because we have something to say that people need to hear. So in other words, I would like to see, I guess, more of a connection between journalistic practices and academic practices. I think academic practices have accumulated a vast baggage that slows us down.
TED: That’s a nice way to situate it because what I find frustrating about the immediacy part of all of this is that it’s often coupled with brevity. So you have a tweet, or you have a hundred and sixty characters to talk about something that needs a more journalistic, a more in-depth inquiry or discussion. But, on the far end of that spectrum, is the academic process, which is prolonged and, you know, really laborious. But I think it was your comment, Anthony, you said, “well, what is it that journalists do that podcasters are perhaps doing again?” You know, is the kind of investigative work that we do, if we’re going to podcast, any different than what CBC2 might produce or NPR3 or people who are skilled at doing inquiry and putting it out in these forms?
ANTHONY: Yeah, I think that [about] your question about what’s the difference between good anthropological ethnography and good travel writing, right? It’s really not. It’s that one went through all sorts of review and the other didn’t. But I think that the whole question of currency and speed is interesting because one of the big values of writing, to us as a species was that it slowed down the production — speech — [CARL chuckles] and made you, forced you into a kind of reflectivity that, you know, might not have happened otherwise. So there’s also something there. Yes, it’s immediate and I totally agree with it. I think, “here’s this fund of knowledge and expertise in universities that takes a year, at least, to respond to current events, and by then they’re no longer current and maybe not even events anymore.” So is there some way that we can —especially in communities — where we can respond to needs in communities more quickly than we have? Yes, sure. On the other hand, how do we preserve what we’ve had in the universities all along, which is the privilege of reflection, the privilege of deliberation, and the privilege of quiet reflection before speech. So that’s the other trade off. How do we balance those things?
CARL: But see, this is really valuable — thinking about it in that way — because as you were speaking then, Anthony, I was thinking that you were describing the work of the poet precisely. So that, see, maybe we should all just write poetry [laughs]. It usually comes back to that. But, you know, when you write poetry, you can’t do it quickly. W. B. Yeats, of all the poems that he published, it was only one, that one short poem that came to him almost intact as he wrote it down. Otherwise he always labored long over his poetry. So I think what we’re getting at here is the, what we actually are not honoring, I think, adequately in the academy, is a lingering with the writing, be it poetry or essays or whatever. And similarly, we’re not lingering with the performative, like with the rehearsals of the performative. Because I would like to encourage us to think about — indeed, the TED Talk would be a great idea — but to linger with the idea of teleprompters, of rehearsing, of working with a few coaches who could guide you and so on. So that when you make the presentation, it is good. Remember in the early days of the video discs, back in the later eighties and so on, and some of our colleagues started producing things on video discs? But it was, you know, you’d inevitably end up with the very dated look of those things very, very quickly, and often after a very stilted kind of presentation and so on. So, you know, they were never really all that useful to anybody really. But, the big deal for me around time is not the time of the actual production of the work itself, it’s the time of the review. It’s the time of the bringing things out into the world. It’s eighteen years for a poem, okay. Three, four years for an academic article. You know, how many of us have been sitting in various files somewhere in the world with anticipation that they might one day be published, but, you know.
TED: Well, particularly, if we think about the anxiety that this produces. We’re on the other side of it now, but if you’re in a pre-tenure process [CARL: Totally.] and are, you know, waiting for that to come out. Eight is the magic number. You’ve got seven but you can’t quite reach eight although you’ve got this letter, and you know, it’s crazy.
CARL: Or you’ve been in the profession for the six years leading up to tenure and so on. And you’ve got a dozen articles in your CV — maybe fourteen, fifteen articles — but a whole bunch of them are in press. And so how does that… they’re in press for very good reasons, it took some time to get up to the place where you had things to write about or whatever, and to submit. And they’re all in the hopper, all in the process. And, so, you know, I think that the issue of time is a very interesting one because I think we want to encourage the reflective time for the production, but we want to see things done in a more timely fashion being sent into the world.
ANTHONY: You’re right, the review process slows us down. And I think there are a number of problems. One of the problems is — and all three of us experience this — the increased demands on all of us for certain voluntary work. What we do, they say, outside of our tasks, right? All the reviewing and doing external reviews. There’s a lot of volunteer work that we do or very underpaid work that we do, to keep the academic, scholarly enterprise going. And I find a shortage of patience for that. I found it when I was a journal editor. I found it harder and harder to get people to do reviews. They were so busy. That’s one thing that’s a concern about that kind of system, choking itself by just too many new scholars desperately needing publications, a mushrooming of journals all needing reviewers. How do you get that work done? There’s another part of this, I’m not sure how this is connected, but I see this pressure to publish on young scholars or on pre-PhD, like, pre-graduate, just horrible because it robs them of the opportunity of taking the time of doing the kind of rehearsal-like work of taking a chance. Who would take a chance to do something like what Jean Mason4 or what Charlotte Hussey5 did. Taking a chance with a dissertation that is really out there on the edge. If you didn’t get published while you were doing it because you were doing such an experimental form, or that you risk daily. You know, I just see that as really, really unfortunate.
CARL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ANTHONY: I also wonder about new metrics, again to go back to that. We do now have — and maybe it’s the time that it will take — we do now have this notion of hits, google hits, as a new way of measuring somebody’s influence, and possibly as a much more valuable way, or accurate way of reflecting influence. And you know, the ISI number, the impact factor of a journal. And it may be that that’s going to change. It may be that someone’s coming forward with a blog that’s had its certain [impact]… maybe that will eventually [happen]… but it’s not going to happen soon.
CARL: And I think of course, there will, I am sure, continue to be real challenges around the evaluative efficacy of hits because, being a grandfather to four little girls, I get to see a lot of Frozen parody on YouTube, and so — Frozen, the movie — right? And it is astonishing how many hits some of these YouTube productions receive when it can be as simple as a young girl, probably distinctly Asian-Canadian or -American, dressing up like Princess Elsa and doing the whole make-up thing so that eventually she’s transformed herself into a quite Queen Elsa lookalike person and so on. And my granddaughters, the two older ones, just watch this fascinated. And of course the hits marker is there, and it’s astonishing.
TED: It goes viral.
CARL: There you go. It goes viral, right? And of course, you know, if you could sell three or four hundred books of poems in this country, you’d think that you’ve got a bestseller on your hands.
ANTHONY: That’s right.
CARL: So, but anyway, I think that maybe the real problem around evaluation assessment for the purposes of tenure, promotion, and so on, maybe the real problem is that just like evaluation assessment of writing in schools, we — in order to tame the complex messiness of the process — we’ve reduced everything to a five-paragraph essay, which we can then mark according to a specific heuristic or rubric. And it seems to make things easier but of course all that it really does is tame the wildness, which is what I do feel is happening with most of the significant academic journals in education that I know. Not the new or online or arts-based journals that I increasingly am seeking to publish in, but something like Educational Researcher is looking increasingly like a journal that wants to sustain traditions that I was anticipating would be in fact contravened or transcended some years ago under other editors. But it looks as if in the usual way of several steps forward in making some progress around transformation, now it looks as if the editorial team has actually stepped back a whole bunch, and now we’ve got these articles. And I have no doubt that the articles in themselves are valuable in a traditional academic kind of way, but I also don’t think that these articles are speaking to the current culture of academic research, which is a different culture from anything we’ve had in the past.
TED: Agreed. And that’s the challenge. I mean, culture, you used the term, “tame the wildness” or we could frame it a little bit differently and say, you just prune off the outliers. [CARL: Yes, right.] So there’s always this press toward the middle, you know, this maintenance of the conformist as a way to ensure that the culture endures. You know, so we have that bedrock, that central set of values that gets passed on, and all the weird and the strange and the bizarre are, you know, the fringe that may or may not survive because they’re killed by the frost or trimmed off or… so, you know, how do we bring in newness to this entity that DNA says “thou shalt produce” and anything that’s a threat we trim away. So, that’s that.
CARL: Well said.
ANTHONY: Maybe that’s one of the interesting things about the study of genres, is that genres protect themselves. They are forms that by the very virtue of their repetition and historical continuity are just the way things are done. Just become the way things are done. So something new is not recognized, or it’s thought to be out, you know, an outlier. And it’s “how do you break these genres? How do you upset them?” And I, like you, Carl, I thought I did think that we were actually coming into an era where that, first of all, qualitative research would take its place as a valued way of coming to know, that we would understand the variety of knowledges and the variety of ways of knowing. This was a moment in human development where we seemed to be becoming enlightened around some of those things, but what you see is a pulling back. You see a longer time to publication, you see much more emphasis on evidence-based research, which means, in people’s minds, statistical or some form of counting… I mean, the Provost at McGill was often quoted as saying that the plural of anecdote is not evidence, [CARL laughs] which is not true. For me, the plural of anecdote is evidence. You know, if the stories begin to resonate, then there’s something that you should be paying attention to. But there is that idea that if it’s simply a story, if it’s only a poem, how can it tell us something?
TED: So I’m looking at my little timer on here. We’ve talked for half an hour. That’s, I don’t know, how many pages of transcript [All laugh] it gives the editors? But we should probably wrap up pretty quick and send it off and we’ll see where it goes from here.
ANTHONY: I think it’s great and I think that you’re courageous to have taken it on, Ted. You know, I would love to see us doing something like that here in the department for our webpage, to do some LLED6 TED Talks. You know, to have fifteen-minute lectures. Get everybody in the department to do a fifteen-minute talk on something that they’re [doing]… and then just post them. I think it’d be great. And again, I think they should put it in their CV.
TED: We’ve done something like that at UVic.7 It’s been coordinated through the Vice-President of Research’s Office and they call it “Faces of UVic,” and they’re trying to get faculty to sit in front of a camera, be interviewed by a professional videographer, who then takes that twenty-minutes and boils it down into a ninety-second “here’s what I’m about.” But again, that sort of editing and looking for thematic content and putting it within a genre, whatever the way of framing it is, is a skillset that not all of us have.
ANTHONY: You can’t just use your cellphone.
TED: You need to be trained. That’s right, that’s right.
CARL: You know, and I did have one of my poems filmed a while back as part of a celebration of Killam awards at UBC8 and so a team of three came with their cameras out to Steve’s, to Garry Point, and we probably spent a couple of hours in the late afternoon, early evening as they filmed me reading and re-reading and re-reading the poem and then eventually constructed the minute-and-a-half or whatever it is presentation of the poem. And it’s very beautifully done. And, you know, I’ve realized, of course, the kind of art that can be created when you’ve got people who know their business with a camera, right? And with angles and light and so on. So I don’t want to, in a way, because the technology is now available to us, I don’t want to suggest that, you know, we could all just take up the technology and do wonderful things. It’s not so much that as it is the realization that there are new ways of disseminating our ideas and our research. See, I think the challenge of the academy — this is probably the last thing I’ll say then for today, Ted, because one thing that I’ll be, and just before I say this one last thing, I’ll say that one of the things I enjoyed so much when listening to your podcast was your voice. [Agreement from ANTHONY.] There was a lovely meditative way in which you were presenting. And so that’s uniquely yours, right? And I wouldn’t expect everybody’s podcast to have that sound. See, and so it was more of the meditative. I’m a jazz-like, kind of late-night, you know certain radio hosts and so on on CBC. And so there was all that going, right? And that was quite lovely. And I’ve forgotten my last comment. I probably should…
ANTHONY: Challenge. Big challenge. Big challenge of the academy.
CARL: Oh, the big challenge for me with the academy is that we have now constructed what I think is largely a hermetic culture so that we now write our stuff to please a small coterie of people who will hopefully give us positive reviews and who will then in turn contribute to our promotions, our getting merit and whatever. And I think that as academics in this wonderfully privileged calling of the scholar, I think we’re losing, losing track of our responsibility to get ideas out into the world, and so the notion of the public intellectual. The notion of the scholar who actually speaks to journalists.
TED: Here’s the perfect example of the public intellectual and maybe how universities have lost sight of that bigger vision that, to the public to which we are accountable. I’m here today because I came over last night to see David Suzuki’s finale for his Blue Dot Tour, and what an amazing collection of individuals he brought together to advance his message of “let’s enshrine protection for air, water, living things in the Constitution.” So we heard academics. We listened and watched Robert Bateman. We listened to musicians. We listened to lawyers. We listened to First Nations people. Everybody with something to say, everyone with a different modality…
ANTHONY: There you go.
TED: …bringing diversity to the issue and it was just… and I can’t think of a more famous public intellectual than David Suzuki.
CARL: And so, that’s perfect. See, that’s exactly the kind of creative scholarship that created scholarly social activism that I think we should be focusing on.
ANTHONY: It’s surprising how locked in we are to a single model of knowledge-making and knowledge-creation that’s the scientific model — which is a very good one; I happen to think that the scientific method is one of the greatest of human inventions — but it’s just one way of coming to know and it just holds over us such power [CARL: Uh-humm.] so that something like that, you know, that by some people wouldn’t be considered intellectual work at all, I mean, “they are musicians for God’s sake, it’s not a show.” [Laughter.] It’s stunning to me how narrow-minded…
TED: But that’s how we change the world is by bringing all of that together. And even David Suzuki, last night, said the science is behind us. We know now and he went through it and talked about the impact of DDT. Didn’t know but now the science tells us. We know the impact of climate change. We didn’t know but now the science has told us. You know, so he’s a scientist in every sense of the word. But it’s getting it out in forms that are digestible.
ANTHONY: Data don’t speak for themselves. They have got to be picked up and championed.
TED: Yes. Okay, well thank you both.
[Pleasantries exchanged.]
TED: Well who knows? You know, depending on where Teresa and Anila take this, you know, maybe there’s a space within CSSE9 or we couldn’t call it a journal but, you know, a sort of educational equivalent to TED Talks where everybody drops in what they have to.
Notes