In 1999, the University of California, Berkeley began an ambitious distributed-computing project associated with its longstanding partnership with the SETI (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) Institute of California. The joint SETI program had for years been a Sisyphean search for signs of intelligence in the radio waves bombarding the Earth from space. The program originally involved gathering colossal amounts of raw data from radio telescopes and sifting through it with specialized and costly on-site supercomputers. The project that began in 1999, called SETI@home, is an extension of SETI from expert researchers and technicians to the general public, outsourcing the resource-intensive data analysis to thousands of PC chips throughout the world. The SETI@home program sends packets of collected data to a program running on each registered user’s computer to be processed whenever the machine is idle and then sent back to UC Berkeley for inclusion in a master database. This was among the earliest examples of Internet “crowdsourcing,” and the thinking has since informed countless other endeavours from raising seed capital to cleaning up image repositories: if it is impracticable to obtain a large amount of some resource from one contributor, aggregate small amounts of that resource from many contributors. SETI@home offers various incentives, referring to the parcels of distributed data as “workunits” (SETI@home) and assigning “credits” to users’ accounts for “workunits” completed. The implicit message is that home users are in a real sense completing and being compensated and recognized for legitimate scientific work.

In the same crowdsourcing spirit, a medieval history professor at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs named Roger Louis Martínez has developed a program called Deciphering Secrets. Part online course, part group research work, part video game, Deciphering Secrets is a multimodal digital-humanities project with an ambitious public-outreach mandate. As Martínez describes the project in a post on Reddit, “We are democratizing discovery! We are crowdsourcing 1,500 pages of medieval manuscripts from the Cathedral of Burgos (Spain). Even better, there is a Massive Open Online Course that accompanies the process” (“We are democratizing discovery!”). Martínez writes that “[o]ne of the huge challenges today is that there is a disconnect between ‘research scholars’ and ‘the public’. Yes, we interact while you are in college, but after, not so much. We shouldn’t let our relationship go sour after you finish your degrees—instead we need to keep learning and discovering together. And we need to invite more people into the fold through free higher education efforts like Massive Open Online Courses.”

Martínez’s MOOC is more than just a course in medieval Spanish history, as he promises to make students into amateur paleographers ready to join the process of “crowdsourcing a previously unseen collection of manuscripts (1000 to 1500 c.e./a.d.) from the Cathedral of Burgos . . . teaching everyday citizens like you to read and transcribe manuscripts” (“We are democratizing discovery!”). To keep the pool of potential labour as large as possible, Martínez has “figured out a way for individuals who do not understand Spanish to work on the manuscript research as well.” One need only learn Martínez’s simple method of identifying and transcribing characters:

Martínez’s website and other promotional material for the course frequently mention the words “open” and “crowdsourcing,” and it might seem as if the project is indeed a kind of open-source and open-access undertaking. Normally, paleography and close textual analysis, like radio astronomy, are done in universities by trained experts, and though the finished product might ultimately be disseminated in publications that manage to reach a broad audience, it is more likely that it will be produced and consumed entirely by members of a small, highly-specialized expert community. Martínez’s project appears to open things up, involving members of the general public not just in the consumption of this work but also its production.

However, by placing Martínez’s course in applied amateur paleography side by side with SETI@home, I am suggesting instead that Deciphering Secrets is not an open-source invitation to the abstruse, formerly inaccessible enterprise of paleography for the exploration of a distributed community of interested amateurs. While in a sense it may be open-access, in that none of its activities or courses involves any real barrier for the user (no tuition, no application process, no pre-requisites, etc.), in an important way true access to the program remains decidedly closed. For example, as Peter Suber points out in his “Open Access Overview,” there are several barriers excluding potential users from otherwise purportedly open-access texts and resources, among them the language barrier that naturally confines the potential audience for any particular text or publication to the people who speak the language in which it is published. This is a vital consideration when evaluating Martínez’s project in terms of the purported “openness” of its avowed public-outreach ambitions, and it is the basis for related questions that might help us interrogate some of the key concepts in play: the roles of producers and consumers, the relationship between academic and more broadly public conceptions of information value, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in open source and open access.

To begin with, Deciphering Secrets seems to confuse the relationship between producer and consumer. Participants in Martínez’s course follow his instructions carefully and work their way through the transcription of texts, and to the extent that they are successful at producing something accurate and academically useful (it is hard to say, but one can see why there might be doubts), their output will have scholarly value. Theirs, however, is rather like the work that SETI@home participants’ computers do on their behalf in the background while the screensaver is displayed onscreen and participants are in the other room making coffee. The “paleographers” in Martínez’s program provide the power necessary to do the work, but they remain nonetheless removed from much of the production/consumption economy to which they contribute that power. They produce something that they are incapable of consuming: the language barrier prevents them from reading, much less comprehending and analyzing, the materials they are transcribing, and they are not really participating in an open-source undertaking at all because the “source code,” the language within which the textual product has meaning and thus value, remains entirely opaque to these users even as they are generating numberless instances of it. They are unable, for example, to observe variations in the content of the medieval texts and make meaning out of these differences, as beginner HTML coders are able to do with access to the pool of open-source web code (Lessig 57-8); Martínez’s participants are less like the avid web tinkerers of the early internet described by Lessig and more like the machines on which their HTML code was executed, adding processing power but no higher-order engagement with the content.

The “source” is “open” in the sense that it is not a proprietary product locked up behind a paywall or otherwise obscured, and in principle any of the participants in Martínez’s course could obtain the necessary education and gain meaningful access to this mountain of available text and the paleographic processes involved in working with it, but this is something like saying that the code that runs the Windows operating system is open because in principle one can always get a job at Microsoft and thereby gain access to it. This may be true, but it sidesteps the point that Martínez’s project is not itself in any clear way the sort of democratizing force that would be capable of creating rich, productive connections between research scholars and the general public as advertised, “expos[ing] more people to medieval manuscripts” and “improv[ing] the standing of the humanities (history, arts, literature, philosophy, etc) in society” (“We are democratizing discovery!“). Martínez’s distributed pool of amateur paleographers, uncomprehendingly transcribing manuscripts and exploring 3D recreations of fifteenth-century Plasencia, does not seem to constitute a real paleographic/historical/textual “commons”—rather, it seems something like a digital sweatshop in which participants process “workunits” in exchange for the illusion of access to the prestige-economy of academic paleography.

Related to all of this is the way that Martínez’s project prompts us to think about what value means in connection with the products of specialists in the general marketplace and the “open-access” space of something like a MOOC-based research project. Again, Martínez tells us that Deciphering Secrets democratizes the textual analysis that used to belong exclusively to and ultimately benefit only elite members of a tiny, cloistered research community; even the name of the project emphasizes this, framing the objects of the paleographer and historian’s work as “secrets” to be uncovered. Everything here is to do with movements of value: from academe to the general public (gaining access to an intellectual endeavour), and from the general public back to academe (making purportedly meaningful contributions to the scholarly discourse of medieval Spanish textual history). The relatively low-stakes activities in the course syllabus, though, seem to call the former value movement into question as thoroughly as the no-Spanish-required policy does the latter. This calls to mind Daniel Allington’s reference to Paul Fyfe’s suggestion about crowdsourced editing potentially “displacing correction onto the reader or to autocorrecting functions of networks” (qtd. in Allington); indeed Martínez’s project underscores how profoundly even extremely widely distributed networks of very interested participants might fail to “autocorrect” specialized work, which inheres in an intellectual economy of some inaccessibility even as instructors like Martínez strive to open it up and render it accessible.

I wonder, then, whether Suber’s account of open access may actually understate the role of language barriers, literally and figuratively, and thus partly obscure an important point about “open” information cultures. “Sources” are languages, and “access” depends on one’s ability to read and participate in the value exchanges associated with those languages; thus in connection with both open-source software and open-access publication, the “openness” of a document depends a great deal on the “language” it is in, not just literally (it is in English, it is in hypertext markup, it is in a legible hand) but figuratively (it is part of a conversation to which I am party, it is part of a language economy to whose goods and value I have access). We might reflect on such “open questions” as it were, then, as we consider the roles of production and consumption in information economies, and on the types and degrees of value involved.

Works Cited

Allington, Daniel. “On Open Access, and Why It’s Not the Answer.” Daniel Allington.net, 15 October 2013. http://www.danielallington.net/2013/10/open-access-why-not-answer/. Accessed 21 Sep. 2016.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House, 2001.

SETI@home. http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/. Accessed 21 Sep. 2016.

Suber, Peter. “Open Access Overview.” 5 Dec. 2015. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. Accessed 21 Sep. 2016.

“We are democratizing discovery! We are crowdsourcing 1,500 pages of medieval manuscripts from the Cathedral of Burgos (Spain). Even better, there is a Massive Open Online Course that accompanies the process.” Reddit, 14 Apr. 2016. https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/4etaz8/we_are_democratizing_discovery_we_are/. Accessed 21 Sep. 2016.