Two Talks on Scholarly Communication from the MLA's Kathleen Fitzpatrick

  Share

Kathleen Fitzpatrick will discuss how scholars, publishers, librarians, and administrators all reconsider their ways of thinking in order to give digital scholarly communication, as well as the MLA's new scholar-social network.

On 28 March 2013, the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) will host Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, for two talks on the present and future of how scholars communicate and interact with each other.

The first talk, "MLA Commons: Scholarly Societies and Social Networks," will take place at 12pm in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library. MLA Commons (http://commons.mla.org/) launched in January 2013 as a network within which MLA members can create group discussions, share their work, publish individual or group blogs, and generally communicate with the other scholars in their fields. This presentation will explore the Commons's possibilities as a platform for scholarly communication and publishing.

The second talk, "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy," will take place at 4pm in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library: 

The future of scholarly communication undoubtedly lies online, but the most significant challenges faced in transforming scholarly practices are not technological, but instead social and institutional. How must scholars, publishers, librarians, and administrators all reconsider their ways of thinking in order to give digital scholarly communication its future? This talk will explore some of those changes and their implications for our lives and work within universities.

We hope that you will join us for one or both of these talks!

In addition to Director of Scholarly Communication of the MLA, Fitzpatrick is Professor of Media Studies (on leave) at Pomona College and Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, published in 2011 by NYU Press and previously made available for open peer review online  (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence), and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, published in 2006 by Vanderbilt University Press. She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).