E-groups for Scholars

Every year, millions of news items on Kerala appear in print. With the proliferation of district-level editions of Malayalam newspapers that localise sub-district news in inner pages, it has become impossible for any journalist to keep track of every news story in one state, even within one’s own narrow topics of interest.

A similar information overload problem confronts the academic. Thousands of scholarly journals are published in the social sciences and humanities, and academics are flooded by articles in their areas of research interest, not to speak of their disciplines in general. On the one hand, as consumer, he has to wade through the “noise”; on the other, as producer, he wishes to be heard and hence adds to the din.

It is in such a situation that the Kerala Scholars eGroup was launched recently.1  (Disclosure: I am the editor of the e-group.) The Kerala Scholars e-group is a platform to exchange news of publications, conferences, and resources in Kerala studies, and discuss matters of common interest. Membership is free and open to anyone interested in the social sciences and humanities related to Kerala.

Barely a few weeks old, this particular e-group is too young to be evaluated. Hence let us explore the potential use and abuse of electronic discussion groups in general, from the angle of Kerala media studies.

News is the Juice

As the journalist Tom Standage says in Writing on the Wall, internet forums can be seen as today’s digital version of 17th century European coffeehouses which hosted long discussions, and sparked ideas among academics and scientists. In popular understanding, the coffeehouses were sites for free flow of expression and debate. But the coffeehouses were more than just that.

Standage alerts us to coffeehouses which specialised in the discussion of certain subjects. In London, for example, Will’s coffeehouse in Covent Garden brought the literary types together and Lloyd’s drew the merchants and ship-owners. He observes, “Coffeehouses imposed order on the chaotic media environment of the time, sorting material by topic and making it much easier to find specific types of information, and people to discuss it with” (p.108).2 

Today’s scholar, caught in a sea of academic journals, would probably find the flow of saucy gossip in a coffeehouse entertaining, and a scholarly debate or two intellectually satisfying. But the coffeehouse’s usefulness would be greatly enhanced if it cut through the noise and served relevant information sought by the scholar. In other words, an e-group of scholars must go beyond the airing of views; it must be a newswire of the academic world. 

While journals publish the list of recent books, they do not alert readers to recent research carried by rival journals. That is a gap which an e-group can fill; it can draw the attention of scholars and other readers to freshly published peer-reviewed articles. Similarly, while newspapers carry advertisements for fellowships and job positions, they less frequently carry news of research grants or call for papers for an edited volume. The e-group can be the news source for such things.

The e-group as news service is popular in the West. Scholars in the United States and Europe were early adopters of e-groups for disseminating scholarly research and connecting scholars. H-Net (Humanities Network) was founded more than 15 years ago, “linking professors, teachers and students in an egalitarian exchange of ideas and materials.”3  It alone is home to more than 150 such mailing lists, on specialities ranging from Animal Studies, through Memory, and Migration, to War, Water, and West Africa. A discussion list of interest to media scholars thereabouts is Jhistory, for the history of journalism and mass communication.4  Similarly, dozens of electronic mailing lists and groups in economics are listed on the website of the American Economic Association.5  

Closer home, the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, (in New Delhi) hosts useful discussion lists, including on media studies, and some of these carry news.6  Such exceptions aside, the e-group as a news service for scholars is not widespread in our part of the world.

As the higher education sector in Kerala develops, and more media scholars emerge in the state, a specialised e-group for Kerala media studies can be set up and sustained. Until then, a multidisciplinary group can be used to connect with scholars, form research clusters, and collaborate in media research programmes.

Abuse

E-groups are a useful filter but not a perfect solution to information overload.  E-groups of scholars are invariably established with the aim of upholding high academic standards. But this is easier said than done, especially in the current academic climate in our country. In recent years in India, there has been an alarming rise in unethical and unsavoury practices in academic publishing. Articles and books riddled with plagiarism and shoddy research—that would in the past have been rejected at least by leading imprints—nowadays find their way unimpeded to libraries. This plunge into an abyss, which worsens the information overload, is being powered by technological developments in printing, the publisher’s greed for monetary profit, and the university academic’s desire to game the Performance-Based Appraisal System (PABS) set by the University Grants Commission (UGC). Shockingly, fly-by-night journals are being sponsored by government-funded universities, including (I suspect) in Kerala. By 2015, the scene would be aggravated by the heavy infusion of Central funds into higher education, and any extension of the PABS to college teachers.

In such a scenario, with perverse incentives that promote quantity at the expense of quality research, e-groups offering news service, despite their best intentions, might end up publicising low-quality scholarship. Whether and how to avoid that fate is a pressing issue before such ventures. Agreed, e-groups that offer news are in a sense like newspapers and, as we say about journalism, it is unfair to shoot the messenger for delivering the news. Yet, since the usefulness of the e-group is linked to the credibility of the research it publicises, scholars must think actively and take mitigation measures to avoid channelling waters from poisoned wells.