Okay, I get it: collaboration in periodical studies

I was struck by the last couple pages of "The Rise of Periodical Studies," where Latham and Scholes argue for a collaborative model of periodicals scholarship, which they liken to the scientific laboratory. They suggest that the difficulty in establishing "humanities labs," as they would have it, results in large part due to the persistence of the idealization of the humanities scholar as individual genius, cordoned off in the garret.In trying to figure out exactly what this whole "City of Print" thing is, which the (you) organizers seem to have decided to mete out in tantalizing bits and pieces (what? we're making maps? huh? we're annotating a novel? seriously? we are really supposed to read all this stuff before we even get to NY?), this essay more than anything else crystallized for me one of the things I've been struggling with, and perhaps it's something that others have been struggling with as well. Simply put: it's hard to share.I've spent the past few years researching immigrants (mostly German and Jewish), early comic strips, and late-19th-century NYC visual culture, and I also teach a course on literary representations of NYC as well as a course on place and landscape in the development of American literature. I know, and have additionally been assured by Mark and other faculty participating in the Institute, that everyone has at least the same level of expertise on some area or aspect of this so-called "City of Print." On the one hand, I find myself wanting to post to the blog a lot (which I've already done, maybe more than any of you would like!), wanting to put things on the map, wanting to show and tell. On the other, I worry about giving things away. And then I get to feeling all weird and selfish :-SI apologize for lapsing into the confessional mode, but I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way. And I found Latham & Scholes' idea of the humanities lab quite appealing. If the City of Print Institute could be a model of the kind of collaborative scholarship that they advocate, indeed, deem necessary for the development of a robust field of periodical studies, I'm all for it. They write,

If we really wish to understand magazines in all their complexity and specificity ... periodical studies will have to synthesize these scattered areas of interest into collaborative scholarly networks built around these objects. Such a collective effort can provide the diversity of expertise needed to describe the richness of periodical culture and to generate more effective critical and historical tools for analyzing its riches. (530)

Yes, agreed! But it's still hard to share.P.S. I notice that my posts are labeled with my Wordpress username, which is just my initials, JLC, standing for Jean Lee Cole. I should have shared that from the outset!