Edit: But not everyone wants to be transparent. There are gender considerations such as discussed here that I just reconsidered. It doesn't deny the importance of workflow, habits, and productivity - it just causes me to think more about my own status as a white male academic online. I am a victim of my own criticisms!
Every historian needs a workflow. I love the approach I have taken with nvAlt, github, and using If This Then That to push my open-notebook to Twitter, as well as my online writing. I have really honed down on productivity. This is not something we should deny. Not every academic should be aloof in their own head, disorganized. Good habits make good history. Having a productive workflow that we feel comfortable sharing is important.
In my last post Open Access and Social Media I made a very important claim - that (public) history is ethical only if it painstakingly cares to represent (actually or potentially) the various stakeholders, even if they have not approached the project as stakeholders. Now there is a lot of jargon here that sounds like marketing. In a sense it is. And it raises issues of who holds the power. Just because I am creating this historical project with a deliverable, does it make me the 'police' of this history? At least the organizing force? Not to toot my own horn, but in a sense yes: I am also a stakeholder and I have been educated to try to represent this history ethically and appropriately. I would never argue that I am necessary to this history, nor even the best historian for the task. But through my own theorizing, self-criticism, work flow, ethic, method, etc., I believe in my abilities to participate in this history. In fact, such an approach by historians is important: we are not the guardians of truth, telling you the facts of the past. Rather, we are trained academics who use organizational skills, research methods, ethical considerations, etc. to understand the past. And as soon as historians recognize this, they can do good work. This is where I will finally champion open access - if used ethically (that is, with a transparent method, research notes, etc.), it humanizes historians and shows method and workflow, thus putting them in their place as organizers, researchers, etc., not as academics who know the past. I want you to see how we work, how we form ideas, what we consider, etc. For most historians do this ethical work already. Yet they risk creating a false persona when everything is hidden. The Digital Humanities allows for this transparency (again, if used appropriately). Historians, then, must also be willing to fail openly. Such is why I am writing my research piece online, on top of this open notebook.
We must walk a fine line with open access, not being 100% transparent to the point of risking the ethical considerations of stakeholders involved, but also not closed off from our stakeholders. And thus all historians are public historians - we just all work in different realms. The most important aspect of a historian's work is the method and the workflow. That should be transparent. Information - stories - ought to be left to historians and the immediate stakeholders involved to present to other audiences. For history is storytelling about the past. Any positivist, idealistic approach that shares 100% of the information involved (the utopic idealism of open access which, I discuss in my gitbook is impossible anyways), would be rendered meaningless because we would only want and receive information. Storytelling is an art that historians must also remain aware of. In some cases historians are storytellers, in others, they help to facilitate that. We are caught up in constantly shifting roles and tasks.
It really is an entangled mess, isn't it?!
I want this open-notebook approach to be accessible. Yet I am afraid that my If This Then That approach for auto-publishing to twitter furthers the illusion that this is difficult stuff only reserved for the technically savvy. These titles have dashes in them because of a 'bug' - it is just the only workaround I have for keeping the urls without spaces so IFTT will publish a working url.