Bridging the Divide: The Long Tail of Digital Scholarship

Image Credit: Chris Anderson
Creative Commons License: Attribution 2.0 Generic

One of the most fundamental principles in coming to understand a modern mode of content distribution is that of the "Long Tail." The concept of the Long Tail is built on the idea of a left-skewed statistical distribution for content popularity, and basically, it proposes that providing "tail" content serves in increasing sales at minimal costs while providing for a much richer and more diverse content base. The Long Tail was first introduced in 2004 by Wired magazine's chief editor, Chris Anderson, who at that time applied the Long Tail specifically to the entertainment industry. Since that time, the concept of the Long Tail has expanded to embrace  banking, science, and a host of other areas, scholarship among them. Anderson noted that because songs and other forms of digital content facilitate inexpensive reproduction and distribution, producers and online media marketplaces could offer a much broader selection than could, for example, brick-and-mortar stores, which had to rely primarily on high-grossing, "hit" songs. Even on purely digital platforms, these mainstream songs account for the bulk of revenues, but because hosting and distributing "long tail" content is so inexpensive, digital marketplaces are finding that they can cater to both mainstream and more eclectic audiences. As Anderson notes on his blog, "As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare." For scholars writing on somewhat obscure topics like Anglo-Saxon poetic meter or the use of zeugma in the works of Alexander Pope, this ought to sound at least a little bit enticing.



The very existence of Long Tail means that scholars basically continue writing about the things that they are writing about but that they have access to a much broader audience base than would have been possible using traditional modes of distribution. For example, according to a 2005 policy review prepared by the British Academy, many scholarly monographs sell as few as two hundred fifty or three hundred copies ("E-resources for Research" 70). One might (justifiably) argue that those three hundred copies go to libraries and archives that are used by hundreds of people every year, and I would second that position. But as more and more scholars are making their works widely available in digital, online formats (and perhaps more importantly, at minimal cost or for free), they are realizing that there are audiences not in the hundreds but to the tune of several thousands or tens of thousands for even the most obscure of topics. Gideon Burton, who has written extensively on digital distribution and academic reform, posits, "There truly is a market for all the hyper-specialization of academia, and Long Tail dynamics promise available attention not only for minor subjects, but for older works, works in other languages, and works in more diverse formats." In order to truly utilize the advantages of the Long Tail, however, we have to reorient our vision of content distribution toward open digital access.