DIY or Get the IT Guy?

Are there some things we just shouldn't do ourselves?
(From someecards.com)

A large portion of the reading for this week was devoted to the how’s, why’s, and potential benefits and pitfalls of digitization.  The recurring question was, should we do this ourselves?  Certainly there is something to be said for the modern-era historian knowing something about digital formats, websites, navigation, community-based tools like Twitter or chat forums, and maybe even the basics of programming.  But is all of this Do-It-Yourself(erism) (DIY) actually good for the discipline in the long run?

Long before graduate school ate my life, I worked as an audio engineer.  When I started, everything was analog; it took not months, but years to master the equipment and to acquire the skills to effectively record and mix a record.  About fifteen years ago, digital audio made its debut.  As computers got faster, smaller and cheaper, millions of people, who otherwise would have purchased studio time, began to record and mix their own music.  Now everybody is an expert.

It's harder than it looks.

The results have been mixed, to say the least.  On one hand, there’s a lot of great independent music out there that would never otherwise have had an audience.  Artists can collaborate from thousands of miles away, trading recorded tracks via email or peer-to-peer file sharing.  Compressed file formats developed over the last ten years (Mp3, Mp4) have made music more accessible and easier to store.  Digital music is, by popular acclaim, a paragon of democratization.  But was it good for music?  Other than the mass-market appeal, no it wasn’t.

First, recording and mixing are much harder than they look.  It is much easier to do wrong than right; virtually nothing about it is intuitive.  Good equipment is essential, but because this equipment is expensive, the average user quite naturally opts for the cheaper alternative, almost always to the detriment of the end product.  To make matters worse, as we learned in our reading from this week, compressed file formats add another layer of quality loss.  But isn’t it cheaper?  No.  Corrected for inflation, an Mp4 album on iTunes sells for the same price as a 12” vinyl record did in 1970.

Just because we can scan our own documents, create our own websites, clean up our own audio, produce our own videos doesn't mean that we should.  Yes, there are financial issues.  There is no such thing as a budget for these things, so in many cases it’s either DIY or don’t do them at all.  There are, apparently, ethical issues with respect to whom we outsource.  On the other hand, in-house production may lend itself to open access as it exists (perhaps) outside the for-profit, capitalist universe, but that does not make it immune from prosecution (see the EndNote/Zoterolawsuit).  DIY digitization, of course, lends itself to greater involvement in the digital humanities because the steep learning curve provides lots of opportunities for networking and collaboration.

Is there room for a subset of historians who handle the technical end of things?  Alternately, we might collaborate with IT.  I’ve had success doing that while editing digital video for a Public History project using a program with which I was not familiar.  And if he won’t come willingly, we just throw a sack over his head and kidnap him, Comanche style.  Totally doable.