10. #SocialDiss: Transforming the Dissertation into Networked Knowledge Production

Erin Rose Glass

1. Breaking Out of Scholarly Solitude

As anyone knows who has gone through the process, writing a dissertation can be isolating and wearying at times. Attempting to demonstrate mastery of a subject in this particular genre demands long hours of solitary reading and writing with gratification always yet another revision away. Certainly, much can be gained from this arduous process, but it often involves grim and uncertain stretches that make the frequent reports of mental illness in graduate school unsurprising. While some might view these struggles as an important part of scholarly development, for me, they threatened the possibility that I would become a scholar at all. At a certain point, the dissertation had begun to feel like a barrier between myself and the living, and it was no longer clear why I should sacrifice so much for work that promised neither readers nor employment. I soon realized that the only way I could continue my research was if I figured out how to make the dissertation process feel connected to a real and immediate social world. Throwing my insecurities to the wind, I created a plan to use a variety of online tools to draft my dissertation in public view and invite peers and strangers to read and comment along the way. If I was going to spend so much time on a document that is notorious for never being read, then I wanted to see how I might transform the process itself to be its own reward.

Inspired by experiments in social forms of student and scholarly writing that I had only come to learn of in graduate school (and which I will detail later on in this chapter), I created a plan to solicit public review of my dissertation while in the process of writing it. I began the experiment in late February 2017 by posting a draft of the introduction to a public Google Doc and announced its presence on Twitter, Facebook and in a few emails to friends and colleagues over the next few weeks. On the HASTAC blog, an open network that encourages academics to share ideas related to research and teaching, I wrote a short post announcing the experiment as a ‘search of an evermore cooperative, influential, and self-directed student public’. Calling the project #SocialDiss after the hashtag that I used to promote it, I asked:

To what extent can the general public participate in and benefit from the production of a dissertation? How might the private and anxiety-ridden processes of education be transformed into a public good and social joy? Are the imperfect artifacts of learning to be hidden and disposed of as shameful waste, or might they provide fertile soil for the cultivation of a global learning community? Could the form of the dissertation itself blossom into something more vibrant and responsive to today’s world in the process?¹

The draft of the introduction that I posted was far from perfect, perhaps even cringe-worthy at times. But that was the point. I wanted to push against the crippling fear of being judged for imperfect writing and imperfect thoughts. Why should a graduate student writer feel that their work must be perfect in order to participate in writing communities, especially when such perfection is so difficult to achieve for time-poor, working PhD students? Why should forms of student knowledge production focus solely on the final product rather than also encouraging students to use this process to cultivate community and collaborative intellectual practices? To be fair, the isolation I felt may have been exasperated by my personal circumstances: I was writing my dissertation on top of a demanding full-time job three thousand miles away from the academic community I developed in graduate school. But the feeling of isolation was not new—I had felt similarly when I still lived close to my graduate institution—nor did it seem uncommon among graduate students. Student writing requirements can feel isolating at any point in one’s education if they restrict the student’s ability to participate in social life without returning any social nourishment in return.

I carried out #SocialDiss over the course of fifteen months, right up to my defense in April 2018. Though the final form of the dissertation appears much like any traditional, print-oriented dissertation (apart from its afterword and appendix detailing the #SocialDiss process), it was profoundly influenced by the experimental use of different digital writing and networking technologies. These experimental writing practices not only contributed to the intellectual development of the project, they deepened and broadened my scholarly network in important ways and helped make my humanities research more visible (and hopefully more relatable) to my personal networks. In this chapter, I will recount the background, methods, and outcomes of the #SocialDiss project and some of the lessons I believe it offers about the mediating power of writing environments on our intellectual processes. Though #SocialDiss is not necessarily a project I would recommend be repeated to the letter, I think its outcomes suggest that academic writing, especially at the student level, would benefit from digital infrastructure, practices, and incentives that better support forms of in-progress circulation and feedback.

2. Tools for a Student Public

My thinking around the #SocialDiss project was deeply informed by the research I was carrying out for the dissertation itself, which offered a critical history of the adoption of digital technology by universities for humanities research and teaching. In the dissertation, I argued that universities inadvertently taught students to become passive users, or users who are neither capable of understanding how technology mediates their learning activities nor of collectively shaping and governing these technologies according to their needs. I was particularly interested in word processors as a technology whose conventions have become so normalized in academic practice that their influence on our intellectual and social activities in the university is all but invisible. For at least the past twenty-five years, a nearly singular vision of word processing technology has dominated the tools that humanities scholars and students use to produce their academic writing. What can be difficult to appreciate is that this particular manifestation of writing technology privileges certain ideas about the needs of writing while downplaying others, particularly the social and collaborative possibilities of writing. Features like the skeuomorphic writing interface, copy and paste, and file saving and duplication functionality are so common in our word processors that one might almost consider them as natural components of the writing process itself. These features, however, are anything but natural; as scholars such as Carolyn Handa argue,² each of them represents human decisions based on the perceived needs of the writing activity that the program is intended to support as well as the way the programmer views the process and purpose of writing.

The word processor that we have today is largely shaped by business needs to automate tedious aspects of writing through tools like copy and paste features.³ While these time-saving features may be welcome additions to our writing environments—and in fact were celebrated by many academics when they first began to explore word processing in the 1980s⁴—they have, in some ways, monopolized the imagination of how digital technologies can support, shape and enhance writing processes. As numerous scholars in the field of computers and composition theorized and explored in the 1980s and early 1990s, writing technologies can also be designed to fruitfully support a much broader range of cognitive and social processes than we see supported in Microsoft Word and other similar word processors and in ways that make a significant difference to the final product and the experience of writing itself.⁵ However, despite the exciting research and technical development carried out by academics in this area, business-oriented word processors like Microsoft Word became the norm in the academy as opposed to writing technology informed and developed by academic disciplines.

When I arrived at graduate school, I took it for granted—as I believe many academics still do—that writing software was more or less a neutral utility for facilitating the transfer of thoughts from the private mind of the writer to the public page. That does not mean that I was always pleased with whatever writing software I happened to be using or could not imagine a number of improvements. But, all in all, I accepted writing software for what it was along with the belief that—like most forms of digital technology I encountered—it was something made by technologists somewhere far away without any possibility of receiving or caring about my input. I did not imagine that word processors played an influential role in the development of my conception of what it meant to write, think, or produce knowledge. Nor did I imagine that there could be an entirely different form of software production in which the user community (including those who were not technically skilled) might play a role in designing that software. Even if I was told that in fact there were examples and advocates of community-driven software (such as seen in the free software communities), I am not sure I would have been able to imagine what sort of meaningful or intellectual difference academic participation in software design might make. I was largely blind to how—as Johanna Drucker and Patrik Svensson observe—popular technologies used in scholarly production ‘imprint their format features on our thinking and predispose us to organize our thoughts and arguments in conformance with their structuring principles—often from the very beginning of a project’s conception’.⁶

I may have very well continued ignoring the way word processing software influenced my scholarly practice—academic writing, after all, is hard enough without critically unpacking the tools one uses in the process. However, an unexpected collision between my research interests and experiences pushed me to consider how academic writing tools covertly influence the ways we conceptualize and carry out scholarly work. In my pursuit of looking for diverse critical perspectives on technology within twentieth-century literature, I came across the poet Amiri Baraka’s critique of what was the current dominant form of writing technology at the time that he published in 1971:

A typewriter?—why shd [sic] it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an ‘expression-scriber’, if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches […]⁷

I found Baraka’s words both preposterous and brilliant. A writing machine in which one would need to ‘sprawl’ and ‘hang’ in order to write seemed ridiculous in comparison to the practical typewriter, but then again, only because I had absorbed what writing machines like the typewriter and computer taught: that writing is strictly a mental, solemn, and private process. Ironically, however, Baraka’s vision for a writing process that involved the movement of the whole body in some ways seemed more practical than today’s computers given the way computers often cause painful and debilitating back, wrist and neck issues. Baraka’s ability to creatively imagine another possibility for such an ordinary-seeming tool helped me understand that every single aspect of writing technology represented a human decision rather than any sort of natural aspect of the writing process.

During this same early period of my graduate education, several courses I attended required students to post reflections on a course blog or learning management platform as a means of extending our classroom discussion in a virtual space. Some courses even went as far as encouraging us to share our final papers with other students for peer feedback. I was also introduced to the exciting experiments in pre-publication open peer review pioneered by scholars like Kathleen Fitzpatrick, McKenzie Wark and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who used collaborative tools like CommentPress to solicit public review of their scholarly drafts.

And through my own research, I came to learn that educators have been experimenting with forms of virtual and analogue student collaboration since at least the early 1980s, such as detailed and advocated for by Kenneth Bruffee,⁸ William Wresch⁹ and Lester Faigley¹⁰ and championed yet again in the first decade of the twenty-first century by scholars such as by George Siemens,¹¹ Henry Jenkins et al.¹² and Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg.¹³ Encountering these recent and older experiments in social forms of scholarly and student writing further opened my eyes to the way writing tools can reinforce assumptions and practices related to writing, or alternately, open up new and generative possibilities.

Despite the decades-long endorsement of these social forms of academic writing—at least at the level of student writing—it was the first time I had been personally exposed to these practices. And so, while I was eager to partake in the intellectual and social benefits their advocates demonstrated, I also found the experience disorienting and ridden with anxiety. I was excited about the prospect of transforming the solitary activity of writing assignments for courses into an opportunity to exchange ideas with peers and develop intellectual community. I was also curious to explore how the experience and reach of academic activity might change when cultivated in networked environments. But my lived experience of engaging in open peer review for course writing fell somewhat far from these hopes. If writing for a single professor caused anxiety, writing for a class full of strangers could cause one to want to quit graduate education altogether.

Part of the problem may have been due to the fact that I felt suddenly rushed into a new rhetorical situation in which I felt pressure not only to perform ‘learning’ through my writing but to do so with all the likeability, expertise, personality and confidence that seems necessary today for speaking publicly on a social media platform. Though the task of extending classroom discussion in a virtual space may have seemed relatively straightforward, it in fact felt remarkably unclear exactly what one should say in such a space and how one should say it. There was no ongoing student public one could quietly observe in order to develop a sense of how to participate as online discussion sites for courses were popped up and then whisked away with the start and close of every term. The design and functionality of the virtual spaces themselves seemed in conflict with the real needs, practices and sensitivities of student writing, adding further roadblocks to developing genuine and continuous engagement and trust with others. And for numerous technical, institutional and social reasons, none of the writing we posted really had the opportunity to develop a real community of readers in the same way that a tweet, a Facebook post or even a Google Doc have.

Nonetheless, despite the imperfection of these experiences, there were still moments in which the value of networked environments for student writing shone through. Reading the writing of other students gave me a glimpse of their intellectual interests that was not as visible in classroom discussion. Having the opportunity to read their course writing provided the groundwork for connecting with them in real life while also enriching my sense of who might read and even be interested in my own academic writing. Baraka’s words echoed in my mind. why shd student writing depend on technologies that inhibit the cultivation and sustainability of student publics? why shd cat memes and food pictures have digital infrastructure designed to enable their extravagant circulation, but the words that students spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours learning to produce remain largely unseen? What sort of writing tool might in fact allow a student public to flourish and how might such a public change the way students thought about the purpose and possibility of their writing? And could our writing technologies and practices help address the fears and anxieties generated in social forms of student writing?

These questions might have withered on the vine but I was taking a course that required a proposal for a digital project and so I had the opportunity to develop the ideas in earnest. One thing led to another and I was soon writing a grant proposal with Urban Education graduate student Jennifer Stoops, English Professor Matthew K. Gold and The CUNY Academic Commons development team for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start Up Grant. We were incredibly fortunate to receive the grant and spent two years developing Social Paper, a platform intended to provide a centralized space for students to network writing and feedback across terms, courses, and disciplines with granular privacy settings for every individual paper.

While developing this tool, I became increasingly concerned about the rise of what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’, a form of capital accumulation where personal data is collected to ‘predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control’.¹⁴ Though I found that many academics shared concerns about the growing power of surveillance capitalism, it seemed that most of us felt unable to reject its tools in our own knowledge making and communication practices. I became ever more curious about the depoliticization of writing technologies within the university and how they had come to be treated as neutral utilities. But why shd we blindly accept the writing technologies that we have been handed, I wondered, especially in an institution whose goal is to cultivate a critical understanding of the world, including the technology that enables us to produce and share that understanding? Our lack of critically evaluating the standard tools of academic knowledge production wasn’t only keeping us from shaping them to better serve our intellectual needs. It also helped normalize a passive and helpless acceptance of disturbing forms of surveillance and control carried out in technologies used in the academy and beyond. In this context, I came to see Social Paper not just as a tool for supporting the cultivation of student publics, but as a gesture towards the value of community-governed software within the academy. I looked forward to its launch with the hope that I could begin to use Social Paper instead of proprietary tools for all my academic writing to help showcase the value of a participatory approach to our academic writing technologies.

3. Building with Imperfect Tools and Imperfect Words

After we launched a beta version of Social Paper in 2016, it became clear that my plan to use it exclusively for producing and sharing academic writing was unrealistic. While I’m proud of the tool we created and its step towards student-driven software, we did not have enough resources to create a tool capable of competing with writing environments created by major digital companies. By the time I had my dissertation drafts ready, I was concerned that my plan to post them exclusively to Social Paper might sabotage my attempt to generate actual engagement with them given some of the flaws in Social Paper’s user experience. On one hand, I wanted to enact an example of what student writing on a student-developed writing platform might look like, but on the other hand, I also wanted to explore the possibility of creating community around one’s drafting process. Unfortunately, the two desires no longer seemed compatible. I revised my original plan and decided I would post drafts of the dissertation and reflections on the process across a variety of platforms (including Social Paper) in an open, ongoing experiment. What types of engagement—if any—would I receive on different platforms? How would it affect my scholarship and academic experience? And would I regret being so open with the process? I was not sure what to expect.

Of course, given the scarcity of free time in academic life, I didn’t expect that anyone would donate their own small scraps of it to engage with my dissertation project. To my surprise, however, many did. In the weeks that followed my original post I received 125 comments on the draft introduction from eleven different individuals ranging from close colleagues and academic friends to individuals I had only briefly connected with over Twitter at prior conferences. In addition, the project spawned multiple backchannel connections and encounters where folks opted to give me feedback over coffee or email or connected me with other scholars who kindly shared their perspective on my research area. Hundreds more clicked on links related to the project and even friends and family members outside of academia (with whom I rarely discussed my research) began to ask me about some of the topics I wrote about. The professional generosity I encountered during these weeks was humbling and kept my spirits afloat when other challenges made the dissertation journey feel almost impossible. And, for the first time in my graduate education, it felt like the hours of labor I privately spent doing research were at last a visible part of my identity. People everywhere, from all areas of my life, were suddenly asking me about my work! As Brandon Walsh, Head of Graduate Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, recently told me, my dissertation ‘was probably read far more than most dissertations’.

The engagement I received, however, was not only encouraging, but also intellectually invaluable. Altogether, the comments I received represented one of the most wide-ranging and in-depth conversations I’ve ever had about my dissertation topic and were overflowing with information and perspective that simply could not be found in research alone. It was impossible, in fact, to digest the rich set of criticism, related anecdotes, conceptual suggestions, and text recommendations I received even in the first few weeks of #SocialDiss. Commenters offered everything from tips on my choice of language, personal experiences with computers and Usenet in higher education in the early 1980s, their reading notes posted on GitHub on the transformation of science as a pastime to a profession in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the potential relevance of Derrida’s notion of ‘pro-gram,’ and even jokes! One of the authors that I engaged with in the introduction urged me to think more carefully about my use of the cyborg concept while sharing criticisms of his own prior use of the term. There is even a two-part, nearly 1,000-word comment thread debating the difference between ‘programming’ and ‘scripting’, with a passionate discussion of the rather obscure Emacs text editor between two commenters who didn’t know each other. Reading these comments was exhilarating—it was as if I discovered a secret library of unknown texts all related to my dissertation subject.

My commenters also gently pointed out grammatical errors, logical oversights and places where the clarity of my writing could be improved. And while only a few years before, such exposure would have horrified me, I now found it relieving to see that such imperfections wouldn’t cause my community to discount or ignore the arguments I was attempting to develop. While their feedback did contribute to the unwanted realization that I needed to rewrite the introduction entirely, it also provided me with the sense of a real conversation that made this rewriting feel more purposeful. I rewrote many parts of the dissertation with more confidence and ease, with their voices ringing in my head. I was no longer writing to a void, but to a real community of readers whose interests were clear to me.

Over the next few months, I continued with the #SocialDiss experiment, posting drafts and links on Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Hypothes.is, Medium, the HASTAC website, the Modern Language Association’s Humanities Commons, CommentPress, Academia.edu and my personal website. I often posted a draft in one place, wrote a short post about the draft (including a link to it) on another site (such as HASTAC), and then linked to the post on Facebook and Twitter with short introductions to the draft. Writing blog posts on websites invested in cultivating their community (such as HASTAC and the MLA Commons) drew considerable engagement as these organizations would promote my posts on their homepage and social media accounts. It also helped me practice describing my research in a variety of contexts while continuously asking myself why my research might matter to broader publics.

As I suspected, I found that platform functionalities and platform communities made a big difference on the tone, type, and amount of engagement my drafts and posts received. Drafts posted on Google Docs, for example, were far more likely to receive comments than drafts posted anywhere else, and when I gave readers a choice between Google Docs and some other platform, a majority would choose the former. I continued to receive interesting surprises in Google Docs comments, such as uncannily useful feedback from Estee Beck, a scholar I was previously unaware of (leading to my discovery of her very useful research) as well as occasional formatting or spacing corrections from unknown individuals as a friendly sign of their passing through. On Facebook, friends left deeply personal comments about forms of depression and isolation that accompanied their dissertation writing. A short Twitter essay that summarized a chapter and tagged scholars I cite in the chapter resulted in generative conversations with two of those scholars that continue to this day. The various results of different forms of engagement are too lengthy to fully describe here, but they have provided a very rich set of examples to draw on for making decisions about ongoing digital projects and making the case for community-driven software in academia to various stakeholders.

As an experiment, #SocialDiss was an attempt to see whether it was possible to generate community around student writing processes that have traditionally been private and at times even isolating. What I hoped to show is that networked forms of sharing writing and feedback can generate invaluable intellectual and social experiences when given the right opportunities, technologies and communities of practice. While I think the project has successfully demonstrated this claim, my aim is not to suggest that all students should consider carrying out similar networked writing projects using the broad range of tools and practices that I employed. Rather, I want to use this experiment to point to what I think student writing could be if we developed tools, practices, and a culture of sharing that enabled students to share academic writing and feedback as easily as they share other types of content on social media when they feel ready to do so. This is not to say that all student writing should be public—many parts of thinking and learning demand privacy and sheltered spaces. Nor is it to say that we should naively embrace the logic of social media into our academic practices, such as seen with for profit academic platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate. During my search for an ‘evermore cooperative student public’, there were times I felt I was teetering all too close to what Gary Hall calls the ‘uberfication of the university’,¹⁵ a dystopian future where academics have to perform sociality with colleagues and others on social media to maintain a good reputation score. These concerns, however, shouldn’t cause us to disregard the valuable potential of networks for student writing. Nor should they convince us that the conventional word processor, a tool developed for office automation, is a more natural and neutral choice. It remains to be seen then what tools and what words might help us bring about a genuine student public. I hope that Social Paper and #SocialDiss can help contribute to our collective imagining of its possibility.

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