Digital Postscholarly Criticism: Understanding the Global Public Transformation of Literary Humanities through the Video Essay Genre (and Beyond)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The recent proliferation of the digital video essay as a public, personalized, and creative genre on YouTube testifies to the immense popularity of essayistic practices across the globe today. Some of today’s digital video essays from this platform engage in what I call “postscholarly” criticism, which combines the nonprofessional explorations of literary humanities scholarship with personal, social, and public commentary. My essay broadly argues that, by situating academic scholarship in the global digital public domain, today’s author-critics produce self-appointed sites of popular humanities work. To examine the tension between disciplinarity and publicity of postscholarly video essays, I theorize the influences of the academic humanities on today’s author-critics, along with exploring the amateur and public origins of the video essay production. By drawing on relevant examples, I aim to show the salient traits of postscholarly criticism from YouTube, with a focus on its global transmission. Finally, I raise the question of (post-)professionalism within literary public humanities to promote its distinction from today’s popular public practices of criticism. Overall, my essay invites scholars of the public humanities to study the new digital era of postscholarly criticism as a popular phenomenon with significant implications for the literary discipline and beyond.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".