Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities
Daniel J. Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, eds.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 168pp. ISBN: 9780472071982

In Hacking the Academy, Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt bring together in print-form a selection of the essays and conversations originally published in the online version of the “book crowd sourced in one week” at hackingtheacademy.org, which launched in September 2011. The book is divided into three thematic sections, “Hacking Scholarship,” “Hacking Teaching,” and “Hacking Institutions,” with an additional concluding chapter titled “Cautions.” Since the authors were given just one week to submit their entries, most of the submissions are rather short, few exceeding three or four pages. Although this lends a fragmentary quality to the work as a whole, the benefit is that it becomes very accessible as an introduction to larger debates, themes and questions related to digital scholarship and the academy. From this emerges a book that aims not just to raise questions and complain about the current state of affairs, but to offer some concrete solutions from the perspective of scholars “already deeply involved in the digital realm.” But the decision to publish a book stems from the desire to expand the audience to those scholars not so deeply involved in the digital realm. In that sense, the submissions strive to do more than encourage the already-sympathetic to take action, but also seek to convince “scholars of a more conservative bent” that the academy’s original goals of learning, scholarship, and service can be further promoted through digital media and technology. Some of ways the authors try to convince them of this are explored below.

See the full review by HASTAC scholar Maryam Patton (an Undergraduate Research Assistant at Princeton University) here