Oh the Humanities....or why Wikileaks isn't Bad for Scholars

Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education posted an essay on their blog by Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, entitled, 'Why Wikileaks is Bad for Scholars'.  Within the essay, which will be described in further detail below, Drezner argues that the Wikileaks release, far from making the American government more transparent, will instead promote an ill-defined balkanization among agencies, while agents clandestinely report to their secret overmasters via telephone, too afraid of disgruntled officers or pesky leakers to risk dispatching their thoughts to paper or email.

Oh the Humanities!

Okay, so I took some extended liberties with the above statement.  But it's really not that far from what Drezner  argues in his essay.  Obviously, I feel that Drezner is wrong and I want to examine his argument in detail to determine what exactly about the Wikileaks release is so feared.  Beyond the Chronicle post, I also want to analyze a movement that is gaining steam and perhaps points towards a future, not envisioned by Drezner, in which government data is more open, mitigating the damage 'secret' knowledge revelations bring. 

To begin, Drezner invokes the 'nightmare' scenario of giving a paper in front of an audience, only to discover that one participant, a grizzled old who-ever with their crumpled paper, refutes the papers thesis, producing as proof the before-mentioned crumpled paper.  (Drezner uses the adjective wadded, but crumpled possessed more texture for my taste.)  Of course this apocryphal tale only highlights the very danger international relations scholars face in their line of duty.  They use contemporary, yet non-/de-classified, sources of varied scope, read like so many tea leaves in an attempt to produce a corpus of knowledge paralleled, perhaps, only by those devoted kremlinologists of old, when 'secret' sources often exist in government 'classified' files that could make or break the scholars varied arguments.    

Thus Wikileaks produces, according to Drezner, a short term boon for political scientists and diplomatic historians in terms of source base access.  The long term look, however, is less rosy, as Drezner believes the 'leaked' cables will produce a compartmentalized effect of government agency information sharing, among other things: 

American foreign-policy bureaucracies have and will continue to respond to WikiLeaks by clamping down on the dissemination of information.

That means more compartmentalization, to make sure that someone like Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst suspected of disclosing documents to WikiLeaks, can't download classified files from multiple agencies. It means that more cables will be classified, reducing the number of people who can access them and delaying their release to the public. Most important, a lot less will be written down. State Department officials will opt for telephones over e-mail. As a result, future data dumps from WikiLeaks or its imitators are less likely. The cumulative effect of these measures will make it much harder for political scientists and diplomatic historians to piece together how decisions were made.

As if the caption didn't already
give it away. via Molotalk

While I agree that the government will probably bring about tighter security measures when it comes to data access or transport (see this Mashable article on the US military decision to ban the use of USB drives), does that really mean that less will be written down?  Highly doubtful.  There are so many reports, memos, notes, briefings, emails, presentations, etc., needed every day just to make a small section of the government to work, how could one envision implementing a system that essentially draws a clearance line and says, 'beyond this you shall not write'?  I could envision a system where sensitive documents have a decay period, to prevent long term exposure, or where access is simply tightened up to a more select group, but less written down?  Skeptical.

Get me Putin! via toastforbrekkie

And the 'phone over email' point is really just ridiculous.  Perhaps, yes, in the wake of the Wikileaks release, officials will be more cautious in their dictations and instead prefer to conduct reports and decision making over the phone, but that situation is limited by the importance of the event and the availability of the proper parties to be available for phone contact.  In short, it requires extreme rigidity and little tolerance for variation in terms of one party being delayed or another party is busy with other matters and cannot come to the phone, that is the process of government would be woefully more inefficient than before Wikileaks.  The phone argument also discounts one of the main purposes of the diplomatic cables, or other government reports for that matter, in that they are created once so that they may be read by many parties many times over vast temporal spaces.  

Ultimately Drezner concludes that the Wikileaks release will hurt the future scholarship of political scientists and diplomatic historians, as the sources once used to assemble the mosaic of decision making will simply dry up.  While this sounds drastic and dour to the extreme, the zinger of an ending line provided by Drezner fails to take into account the argument presented in the first half of the essay, namely that good scholarship requires diversity in source base.  Here is a quote:

We can and do rely on other sources to "process-trace" decisions on foreign policy, including news reporting, interviews with policy makers, memoirs, and the occasional Bob Woodward book. After 25 years or so, most of the key documents are declassified and published in Foreign Relations of the United States, a many-volume compendium of primary-source documents. Until then, however, scholars wonder if there are top-secret memos somewhere that vindicate or vitiate our hypotheses.

Last time I checked, the Wikileaks brew ha ha did little to stop the creation of news reports or foreign policy decisions, sources Drezner admits his profession uses everyday to carry out their research.  If his argument is correct, that the 'inevitable' clamping down on 'secret' documents will occur and future scholars will be frozen out of viewing them, then yes, political scientists and diplomatic historians will be out of one potentially powerful source, but it is only one source.  The amount of document creation needed to assemble even one of the leaked cables demonstrates that, with enough persistence and dedication, future scholars should have no problem compensating for the 'smoking gun' of 'secret documents' when the shell casings and target practice mats of the transitory material are all around!  

Drezner ends his essay with the following warning:

Julian Assange and other true believers in transparency argue that they have discovered the very crowbar to pry open the U.S. government. Unfortunately for them, WikiLeaks will be more like a boomerang—and the next generation of scholars are the ones who will be hit on the head.

Yet I believe there is a new movement forming around the concept of Open Government Data that will make the claims of Drezner appear shortsighted.  Last month the Open Government Data Camp 2010 met in London to discuss new ideas and projects centered around the promotion and use of open government data sets in order to facilitate easy online access and sharing.  Representing several members of the European Union, presenters discussed topics such as Open Data in Greece and the apps/social changes it has brought about, how open data could help in firefighting, and even linking civil servants to developers so that data sets and their innumerable acronyms/codes can be deciphered.  As the presenter in the video on Open Data in Canada mentioned when looking at analysis of housing rent costs, the real potential of open data is not to enrich the lives of middle class or affluent citizens with smartphones but instead to promote the advancement of social policies that benefit all members of society.  Here is the presentation by the Open Data in Canada group.



I would posit that these open data projects, albeit divorced from the world of scholarly sources, could nonetheless point towards a new direction for future political scientists and diplomatic historians in that they will make transparent a great many details as to the workings of government, or arenas that the government decides is worthy of intervention.  As we become accustomed to taking and interacting with the large data sets presented by the government, developing tools to unlock their quantitative secrets, we can apply those same tools and techniques to other large data sets.  Drezner somewhat hits on this potential when he calls the Wikileaks release a 'potential gold mine' for foreign relations scholars, but the greater potential lies in analyzing even larger data sets, ones that can be created by scholars based on the numerous sources they use in the formulation of their arguments.

Jonathan Stray posted on his blog an overview of a project he and others submitted to the Knight News Challenge competition called 'Overview'.  Stray discussed how data dumps like the Iraq War Logs presented unique challenges to journalists, in that the sheer quantity of documents precluded any detailed analysis in a timely manner.  The initial tool they developed, 'Overview', helps journalists visualize the War Logs by displaying clusters of grouped events.  It is not without limitations however- the data displayed is done so according to specific algorithms that cannot be used to establish relationships between documents based on a specific word order, and the grouping of dots on the map do not necessarily correlate to temporal proximity.  Yet even the rudimentary results displayed below of the December 2006 reports demonstrates the exciting potential this new tool brings to what many would term a herculean task.

Hi-Res Image courtesy of Jonathan Stray at his blog, jonathanstray.com

'Overview', if funded and developed, will be released for open use, the same for many of the tools and data sets discussed by the participants of the Open Government Data Camp 2010.  With some help from our computer science friends, scholars of the humanities could develop or use similar tools to assist their inquiry into various fields of study.  This, largely, is the what 'Digital Humanities' brings to the table, so long as scholars possess the cognizance to recognize the potential benefits to be accrued.  

That is why I find Drezner's argument to be less convincing; instead of facing a deficit of sources, future scholars will find the opposite is true.  Wikileaks may produce a more secretive government.  Yet the growing trend of open data and the possible efficiencies gained in government and everyday life through their use suggest that any reduction of source base from 'government' documents due to the recent leak will clearly be offset by the knowledge gained through 'transparent' operations.  Wikileaks isn't bad for scholars- it merely demonstrates the possibility of large data set analysis to render moot the all hallowed importance attributed to 'secret' documents in developing scholarly arguments.