Earlier this month I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Kathleen Fitzpatrick about her career of writing both on, off, and about the web. I’ve wanted to talk publicly with Kathleen about her journey after her absolutely brilliant keynote at Reclaim Open in 2023, thankfully this emergent “On Writing” series gave me an excuse.
One recurring thread that comes up when talking with or about Kathleen is generosity, and I think this conversation highlights just how generous she is as both a thinker and a leader (not to mention an interviewee). I’ve witnessed her career arc firsthand and it’s maintained a razor sharp focus on creating and promoting the web as a tool for academics to imagine alternative ways of working collaboratively. Hers is a ridiculously impressive CV that moves from Media Commons to MLA Commons to Humanities Commons and now Knowledge Commons, examples of increasingly larger concentric circles of academic social networks that provide an intellectual green spaces outside corporate platforms—spaces higher education so desperately needs.
But that’s just part of the story covered here, it was amazing to hear about her early blog epiphany that informed an approach to her scholarly writing that remains apparent in her most recent books on generosity in both thought and leadership. I’ve increasingly become a big fan of Kathleen’s community building work, and having the space to learn and document the pivotal role she continues to play in defining an open, responsible, and generous network for digital scholarship in the US and beyond was truly a pleasure.
John Maxwell noted that “future historians of the present should take note of this [interview] as a narrative index to the history of the web.” I may be biased, but I tend to agree that Kathleen’s story provides something of an ur-narrative for a generation of scholars that would ultimately define and be defined by the digital revolution. Arguably, few in the field have defined it more powerfully in their writings over the last 20 years than her.
