In January 2024, Angela Gibson stepped into her new role as Senior Director of Operational Strategy at the Modern Language Association (MLA). We had the opportunity to sit down with Angela to discuss her insights on the MLA International Bibliography(MLAIB) and its pivotal role in advancing research. Read on to discover her reflections one year in and vision for the future.
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Article Contents
- Background
- Language Literature Skills
- Challenges Facing Researchers
- MLA Support
- Beneficial Features
- Trends
Please talk about your background in language and literature and your path to the MLA.
I hold a PhD in Middle English from the University of Rochester. Before coming to the MLA, I taught college courses in writing and literature, worked on an NEH-grant-funded project to edit and publish medieval texts for classroom use that weren’t readily available, and even did a brief stint in the editorial office of a STEM journal. I started in the editorial unit at the MLA and eventually came to oversee the publications editorial, operational, and business areas of the publications program.
Why are the skills developed by language and literature researchers so crucial today?
Research requires human interpretation of language, which is what language and literature scholars are trained to do. And here’s an example of why this expertise is important: I was at a meeting about generative AI with someone at a major technology company. At one point, he said that the developers down the hallway have one goal: getting people to use the products they’re creating. End of story. And what he said next was striking: they have zero incentive to enable users to know what the source of information is–which version of a text it came from, which entity sponsored it, who created it, or even where the human ends and the machine begins. These are the very things that language and literature scholars are trained to value. And it is our job, he said, to “force” the people making these products–and those who use such products–to care about these things, to understand their importance. Because no one else is going to do it.
Having a human in the process starts, of course, with the scholar writing the research. Although STEM researchers are talking about automating the research review, in language and literature fields such automation doesn’t make sense: the words are the data that gets interpreted. Having a human in the process is therefore just as important when assembling a research database like the MLAIB–and, in fact, the MLAIB has dozens of trained scholars all working to assess the materials that go into the database, including those working in our field bibliographers and fellowship programs. That means when a new or seasoned researcher is looking for sources in it, they have been vetted as relevant to our fields.
What are the biggest challenges facing student researchers, and how can resources like the MLA International Bibliography with Full Text help address these challenges?
Finding time to do research is a perennial issue for most researchers, including students. The curated full-text collection simplifies the discovery phase of research for students so they can spend more time on thoughtful analysis.
I also hear regularly that students need guidance on how to do research. The MLAIB bibliography has created a free online course that students can take to learn fundamental research skills, available here. It’s important for students to learn and practice research skills in a curated space rich with sources that they know were created by human beings–not the wild west of the Internet, let alone a gen AI tool that’s inventing sources and even furnishing information using words that are strung together by predictive algorithms mimicking human text, words devoid of human intention.
The MLA also publishes two instructional guides for student researchers: The MLA Guide to Undergraduate Research in Literature and The MLA Guide to Digital Literacy. Both feature examples of using the MLAIB (and other resources) to learn effective research skills.
Can you elaborate on the role of the Modern Language Association in supporting language and literature research?
In addition to the student instructional resources mentioned above, the MLA supports language and literature research in many ways: we run the premier journal in the field, PMLA; convene an annual meeting with over 600 sessions on language and literature; publish books on teaching language and literature and, with the MLA Handbook, on source evaluation and citation; offer numerous grants and prizes to researchers; and, through the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Language Departments, support the professional development of academic program leaders in languages and literatures (and the humanities broadly). Put together, our many resources reach an audience ranging from middle school students to graduate students to faculty members and librarians to academic program leaders and deans. The MLAIB is our widest-ranging resource, serving institutions around the world, and is therefore at the center of all this work. It is not an overstatement to say that using and subscribing to the MLAIB therefore supports a very broad humanities ecosystem.
Are there specific aspects or features of the MLA International Bibliography that you think are underutilized but beneficial for researchers and scholars?
The MLA thesaurus is a literal treasure (in fact, the word thesaurus derives from the Greek word for treasure), and researchers should use it more widely. By scrolling down to the "Subjects" tab researchers can discover a trove of linked subject terms, names, and work titles. The MLA thesaurus holds not only the taxonomy that indexers employ to organize publications by subject, but also the controlled vocabulary they use to allow researchers to find publications that will be valuable to them in their work.
Another underused tool is the MLA Directory of Periodicals, an online database included with MLAIB subscriptions. This resource provides detailed information on over 25,000 journals and book series–like submission requirements, circulation, peer review policies, contact information and more. It can be used by scholars as a one-stop resource to find outlets for publishing their work and by librarians to identify journals to add to their collections.
A couple of other features that are ever-popular with scholars are the ability to filter by publication date and journal title in order to browse the latest research in their field, and the notes section. These notes, written by our staff of indexers, often provide useful context for a publication, such as pointing to an earlier publication it was written in response to.
Looking ahead, what trends are you watching in language and literature research, and how is the MLA adapting to support these changes?
When thinking broadly about research trends, I don’t think we can remove language and literature from the broader landscape. As with open access, models that get developed for STEM research affect the humanities, and sometimes there’s a “fit” mismatch. Right now, I have my eye on peer review and AI (as separate and related issues). STEM has an “economies of scale” problem with peer review that the humanities doesn’t have, at least not to the same degree. Any changes to, let alone standardization of, peer review that gets conceived–not to mention the tools that the industry around STEM develops to carry out those changes–might not work for the humanities. And, going back to the “human in” discussion, the idea of using AI in peer review would seem like an area of special concern for language and literature fields. So we’re beginning to talk about how to specifically assess the effectiveness of peer review for language and literature fields, especially as it concerns reducing bias and increasing diversity and inclusion; how to develop training and resources and support for doing peer review; and how to define and articulate its value–and, here, the new EBSCO UI’s ability to indicate that a source has been peer reviewed is an important innovation, sure to help researchers.
On the generative AI front, it’s clear that this technology will enable new tools for researchers, some of which EBSCO is already experimenting with. So I think the challenge will be knowing which ones researchers want, which ones complement the process of human decision-making, and which ones allow us to understand where information comes from and the boundary between human and machine. We’re looking forward to partnering with EBSCO in this effort.
