Disembargo 2.0

Disembargo 2.0 is a reimplementation of a project launched in September 2013 but which eventually broke before completion. The original Disembargo parodied the advice from elite academic institutions and scholarly associations that doctoral dissertations be withheld from digital circulation for a period of up to six years, a procedure called an embargo.

But how does an academic embargo play out? Who benefits from an embargoed dissertation? How much value does withheld research accrue? How long is six years when it comes to scholarly communication? In order to explore these questions I created Disembargo. Disembargo is a dissertation—my own—emerging from a six-year embargo, one letter at a time. Every ten minutes a single letter, number, or space from the final dissertation manuscript is published under a Creative Commons license, an excruciating pace that dramatizes the silence of an embargo. Due to changing web architecture, the original Disembargo broke several years into the process. This new version launched on May 18, 2021. At the current rate of access (six characters per hour, or roughly twenty-five words a day), the entire dissertation will be available in the spring of 2027.

Disembargo is a project by Mark Sample. The original Disembargo would not have been possible without the help of Darius Kazemi and Joel McCoy. Jim English, my long-suffering dissertation advisor, also deserves a slow shout-out. Jim would not be surprised that I turned my dissertation into a piece of conceptual art instead of a book.