Bridging the Divide: The Watermill Principle

Photo courtesy of Oliver Bacquet
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Despite the Watermill Principle's utter simplicity, it remains an essential component in understanding the potential of digital writing to rescue and revitalize the humanities. The concept is this: if you want a watermill to work for you, you build it by a river. Initially, this concept may seem a bit facile, but when related to writing and, more specifically, to digital writing, it becomes a foundational principle for creating meaningful content and effecting real change in the world.

So, I say it again: build your watermill by a river, not in a desert. Too often in formal academic writing, the proposed audience consists of a selective group of scholars and specialists. Academics often assume that because their work is specific and eclectic, it must therefore have relevance only to an isolated group of individuals. While this is, in some cases, true, more often than not, scholarly works are kept from cultural relevance only because they are kept from the people. Scholars sometimes build their watermills in the desert and either expect the river to flow to them or spend much of their time trying to carve channels in order to direct the flow of readers to their work--sometimes, dare I say, even through social media! While this perhaps proves effective in certain cases, the reality is that there exists a much simpler and more effective way of engaging audiences: you build around those audiences. Rather than trying to redirect the stream toward one's work, the digital scholar builds his research around people and communities, engaging in social proof and receiving feedback on both informal and formal levels. Admittedly, this involves a major paradigm shift for scholars who are used to working in more constrained environments, but building one's scholarly watermill on the river means that the flow of readers is already established. The ideas have been vetted in early stages of social proof, and there are already people interested in the topics, be they scholars, enthusiasts, or just curious users. Aside from that, digital modes of distribution have the potential to open up works of scholarship to a much broader audience, to a veritable river of people and communities with diverse interests and backgrounds, so the work becomes not a static monument to be viewed only by the acolytes of academia but instead a fundamental component within the rich and vibrant conversation and progression of human thought.