POST: Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing 1

Johanna Drucker has written an article for the Los Angles Review of Books discussing the misconception that digital technology will “cure” academic publishing:

To make sure humanities scholarship thrives, it is crucial that we cut through the fog of pixel dust–induced illusion to the practical realities of what digital technology offers to scholarship. Among the prevailing misconceptions about digital production of any kind is that it is cheap, permanent yet somehow immaterial, and that it is done by “machines” — that is, with little human labor.

Drucker asserts that “hard, serious, life-long dedication to scholarship, the actual professional work of experts in a field, will remain at the center of knowledge production” and that “we can’t design ourselves out of the responsibility for supporting the humanities, or for making clear the importance of their forms of knowledge to our evolving culture.”