I took a class last fall which involved some fairly intense reading for someone with no theory background. One of the questions the professor asked throughout the semester was essentially "How do we get these ideas out to a general public?" She, like me, is someone interested in making significant social change to better the lives of other people. My honest answer was, "Make them more accessible to the Average Joe."
It's not like the Average Joe couldn't buy the titles we were reading on Amazon like I did; anyone certainly could. It was just that the arguments in some of the books were articulated in such a complicated way, the average non-academic would struggle getting past the second page, which would even make it hard to give the books away for free. It also didn't help that the books were mainly written for a close-knit group of scholars, who exchanged ideas with each other rather regularly. People need to be able to have relatively easy access to understandable information if they're, at least, going to read it. I believe digitization offers several options to do that. If I can post or publish one thing that will challenge a person's perceptions of native issues in this country, I'll feel like my career won't be wasted.
I saw the digital methods class as a way to learn how to do it or at least how other scholars are doing it. It seems that in a lot of humanities fields, especially history, tradition and progress seem to be at odds sometimes. Julia Flanders and Chuck Tryon argued in their pieces that scholars in the humanities aren't strangers to using technology to get their ideas out in the open. However, the need to put future scholars through a "hazing" ritual of the same trials and measurements that their advisors and mentors did seems to stand in the way of incorporating the digital with creating new Ph.Ds or tenured faculty.
William Cronon and Mark Sample seem to have pretty progressive views about how the digital can add to scholarship. In an article titled "Getting Ready to Do History," Cronon proposed that doctoral candidates post their research and findings to websites as supposed to writing 500 pages of a dissertation that very few people will read. Larry Cebula was able to use his successful blog to get tenure. I know everybody doesn't agree that getting a doctoral degree or getting tenure should "appear" to be so simple. I can understand why.
If digitization will work for historians and others in the humanities, it needs to match the standards of the work we produce. While Chuck Tryon acknowledges how helpful blogging can be to scholars, he also says that the ability to publish material immediately leads to "the production of unreflective, spontaneous material that doesn't reflect thought or analysis." As long and tedious as the peer or blind review process is and may be, it helps to ensure that high standards of scholarship are followed in publishing. This is merely one example of the hurdles that humanities will have to overcome if it is to adapt to an increasingly digital world, and adapt it must.
Whereas some scholars wouldn't value the input of non-academics regarding their work, having such input would be valuable to mine. What better way is there to judge if your research or analysis is relevant to the people you mean to reach? But then, I want to reach the ordinary citizen; other scholars are only interested in writing for other scholars.
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