Abstracts

Putting Open Social Scholarship Into Practice

December 8–9 2021 North America time / December 9–10 2021 Australasia time

Featured Panels

Appavoo, Clare (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), “Partnership in Action: CRKN’s Approach to Strategic Partnership in Digitized Documentary Heritage”

For our member organizations and the diverse communities that they serve, CRKN empowers researchers, educators, and society with greater access to the world’s research and Canada’s preserved documentary heritage. Developing and fostering partnerships with like minded organizations and research groups, is a cornerstone of CRKN’s strategic approach to meeting its mission: to advance interconnected, sustainable access to the world’s research and to Canada’s documentary heritage content. On this panel, we will provide an overview of our approach to partnership and outline opportunities for researchers to contribute to the future development of Canada’s digitized documentary heritage through the Canadiana collections.

Barnett, Tully (Flinders U), “The page and its digital facsimiles: using creative workshops to explore the conceptual architecture of digital textual infrastructure”

Digitization continues to be a source of challenge and opportunity in equal measure for the caretakers of cultural artefacts, often in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector, as well as for the community of users for whom access can be complicated by a range of factors. One of these factors is the lack of a conceptual architecture for articulating the specificities of the experience of interacting with digital objects and their relationship to their material doppelgangers. To better understand how the concepts of material and digital textuality circulate in complicated ways in the digital age, this paper reports on a series of hands on, creative workshops I have devised that enable participants to print a page, build a zine, digitize the material text and then house the work in a raspberry-pi library in publicly-accessible locations. The workshops step participants through the processes of material and digital text-making and thereby render visible the connections between the material object and the digital object that get extruded through the decisions that individuals, communities and institutions make about their textual infrastructures.

Bengtson, Jonathan (UVic), “Five Years Makes All the Difference: Towards a Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy”

The National Heritage Digitization Strategy (NHDS) outlines a way for Canadian memory institutions to work together to digitize, preserve, and make accessible Canada’s documentary heritage. Around the world, memory institutions have seen the importance of making their collections available online. They have developed strategies to digitize their analog collections, often by working together with other organizations, and the non-profit and private sectors. Until 2016, Canada did not have a coordinated effort of its own. Over its first five years, the NHDS has gained momentum and in 2021-2022 is undergoing a major strategic planning review with wide community consultation. This presentation will provide an update on the conversations to-date and an opportunity to provide input into the critical elements of a national digitization strategy.

Brown, Susan (U Guelph), “The Evolution of a Linked Data Ecosystem in Canada”

This paper emerges from the LINCS cyberinfrastructure project, the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship, that is converting a wide range of existing datasets to linked data, as well as creating the conditions by which that data can be used and more data converted or created to interact with it. However, LINCS as a linked open data project is one part of a larger emerging ecosystem of linked data infrastructure both in Canada and internationally. This paper opens a discussion of the needs of this component of open social scholarship by walking through three evolving version of a diagram envisioning what such an ecosystem for cultural and other related scholarship might look like. Briefly reflecting on the use of the term “ecosystem” in the literature surrounding (digital research) infrastructure, I will use the diagram to lead into a discussion of how we can move towards such an ecosystem in Canada, what we can learn from other countries such as Australia about this kind of work, and where the most significant gaps and challenges lie.

Crompton, Connie (U Ottawa), “Renewing Older Media and Older Politics: The Sociality of Making Scholarship Open”

Duncan, Ian (Australian Research Data Commons), “Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice: What does that actually mean for researchers?”

The principles-based drive to make publicly funded research outputs as available to as many people as possible bumps into organisational and researcher restraints including risk management, ensuring the maximum value is squeezed out of that work for both the researcher and their institution before it is released, and often there are concerns about how others will understand and use your data outputs.  Balancing all of these different tensions is difficult on a lab level, complicated on an institutional level, and really complex on a national or international level!

At ARDC we are approaching these challenges through the model of a data commons, or actually through the model of several data commons which together could create a national research data commons.  Platforms, data assets, policies, skills and workforce development, definitions, and even the underpinning infrastructure itself can help and hinder sharing and collaboration and need to mesh with legislation, funding and publisher requirements (which sometimes just don’t match up!).

In our view we can’t *make* people share but we can make it technically easier, less threatening, and more rewarding to do so.

Haigh, Susan (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), “Toward Open Scholarship: Did COVID Accelerate the Transition?”

Framed by the question of whether the 2020 pandemic response had side effects that paved the way, or even hastened, changes to the scholarship ecosystem, the presentation will look at the work of CARL and others to advance open access publishing, open data, open education resources, and open licensing in the academic research environment.

Kehoe, Inba (UVic), “Open Scholarship and its impact on Higher Education”

Scholars who engage in open scholarship practices do it in order to “broaden knowledge and reduce barriers to access to knowledge and information.” My role at UVic Libraries is to support researchers throughout the research and teaching lifecycle and this may include the following activities: Facilitate the sharing, as openly as possible, and preservation of the university’s scholarly output, including research publications, research data and related computer code, student digital scholarship, and open course materials. This may also include the creation of open access publications and author rights consultations. One of the biggest barriers to engaging in open scholarly practices are institutional tenure and promotion policies.

Lawrence, Amanda (RMIT), “Multisector Research Publishing in a Multicentric Policymaking Ecosystem”

Policymaking is a complex multicentric process involving a range of actors, institutions, networks, ideas and contexts (Cairney et al. 2019). This view of public policy also provides a framework for studying the role of research and research publishing in the public sphere, as part of the interactive, intersecting, co-production of policy problems, conditions and solutions across multiple sectors of society over time and space. Societies around the world make a considerable investment in research and development. According to UNESCO figures, global spending on R&D reached a record high of almost US$ 1.7 trillion in 2019. By sector, in the 2017-18 period, businesses in Australia spent over AUD$17 billion on R&D, higher education AUD$11 billion, government AUD$3 billion and the private non-profit sector over AUD$1 billion. From this investment in research we can expect to see some level of research communication and knowledge transfer, primarily via the production of research publications, but also through datasets and other formats, training and education, technologies and processes. While organisations in all four sectors of the innovation system are active producers and publishers of research, the nature of this publishing economy is often overlooked in discussions of the scholarly communication system. By producing their own publications and by publishing directly on their own websites, organisations across government, education, civil society and commercial sectors are able to customise, tailor and target their publications to audience, client and funder needs, creating alternative communication channels and cross-sectoral networks that operate alongside commercial and non-commercial academic publishing models. In this presentation I will outline some of the key aspects of the multisector research publishing economy and how it intersects with and contributes to open scholarship and a multicentric policymaking ecosystem.

Miller, Gabriel (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), “Strategies for Open Scholarship”

As more researchers and funders embrace the principles of Open Scholarship, there’s a growing need for effective strategies that will put those principles into practice. Continued progress will depend on our ability to unite diverse groups in a national project to integrate the aims of Open Scholarship with sustainable new business models. How close are we to undertaking such a project? What are the barriers? What do we need to put in place if we are going to succeed?

Niemann, Tanja (Érudit), “The Coalition Publica”

Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project have teamed up to develop a collaborative initiative dedicated to journal publishing in the social sciences and humanities, Coalition Publica. The fragmentation of publishing and dissemination tools and platforms is a risk. The strategy should be integration rather than fragmentation, and coordination rather than competition. This contribution aims to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the building of this partnership and will outline the services offered to Canadian humanities and social science researchers.

Verhoeven, Deb (U Alberta), “Scholarship in a Clopen World”

The global COVID-19 pandemic has, without a doubt, reshaped our perception of the value of closure and openness. Here in Melbourne, the city that locked down the longest, we are emerging into a state of what has been called clopen* which means both/neither open and/nor closed. I want to take this opportunity to consider for a moment what scholarship in a clopen world feels like and how it might inform a different perspective of open scholarship initiatives. I have spoken previously about how open scholarship and open data are best understood, not in terms of the attributes of the data or scholarship itself, but rather in terms of processes of opening. For my mind, open scholarship is scholarship that creates the conditions for openness: that enables us to be open to whatever we are not, that opens us to being challenged, and most importantly to change. Creating checklists of attributes that characterise “open scholarship” is especially unhelpful and plays to a performative, neo-liberal culture of comparative metrics. Innovation startups, universities, research funding agencies, paywalling publishers, open science initiatives like the FAIR consortium and so on, use the language of openness but in reality reiterate longstanding closures. Perhaps we could rather see them as “clopen” – just open enough to disguise an underlying resistance to fundamental change. Alternatively, how might clopenness offer insights into the ways academic infrastructures (as iterations of patriarchy/capitalism/neo-liberalism) apply an “openness penalty” that works to obstruct new players (minorities) from entering?

*clopen has also meant different things at different times and in different contexts but is typically a reference to the overlapping of openings and closings.

Lightning Talks

Arbuckle, Alyssa (UVic); El Khatib, Randa (U Toronto Scarborough); Jensen, Graham (UVic); Winter, Caroline (UVic); Siemens, Ray (UVic), “Surveying the Open Social Scholarship Critical Landscape: Connection, Training, Community, Policy”

Open access is no longer the hot new thing nor a niche movement championed by a small group of impassioned scholars, librarians, and technologists. In 2021, the sharp focus on open access has broadened out to the wider concept and practice of open scholarship, encompassing open data, open education, open knowledge, and many other opens as well. The INKE Partnership suggests taking open scholarship one step further into open social scholarship. Such an evolution is representative of changing notions around the purpose and possibility of academic work. But what is the foundational scope of open social scholarship? To avoid genericizing and broadening to the point where this sort of activity is undefinable or indistinguishable, we will present four interrelated large research scans–grouped under the themes Connection, Training, Policy, and Community–that reflect an intellectual framework for open social scholarship.

Arthur, Paul; Koutras, Nikos; & Hearn, Lydia (Edith Cowan U) “Open Digital Scholarship for Creative Industries: A Review through the Lens of Copyright Governance”

Over the past two decades, the so-called technology revolution has meant creative industries are dramatically changing the way knowledge and information can be created, preserved, and shared more open and freely with the broader public. Today, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) are digitalising globally significant collections of cultural and heritage materials that are indispensable for research and societal benefit. Through access to large digital archives, databases, and multimodal media texts (photographs, art, music and performance, news and media, virtual realities, etc.), together with complex software and tools in diverse areas of cultural heritage and deep mapping, language and translation technologies, data visualisation and modelling, and many other applications, the creative industries are using innovative approaches to make information more widely accessible. Yet despite the clear benefits, many concerns exist over copyright laws, safety and IP laws, who owns the rights to these digitised objects, how can they best be protected and preserved, and what international derivatives and regulations exist to unify access and change copyright protection regimes. This presentation will highlight some of the legal issues around open scholarship for the creative industries. Our presentation will reflect on some the legal concerns around IP and copyright laws in Western Australia and will examine what type of governance models could improve copyright regulations, particularly given the diverse needs of creative industries. Within this context, we will review what can learnt from copyright laws introduced in the European Union.

Carey, Joanne; Langille, Donna; Lekei Madelaine; & McDonald, Fiona (U British Columbia, Okanagan) “The Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) Press”

As a newly redesigned open-access publisher, the Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) Press seeks to facilitate the high-quality production and equitable distribution of research materials that contributes to innovative approaches in community-engaged scholarship. Located on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Sylix Okanagan People at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, ICER Press aims to encourage capacity-building by developing the necessary infrastructure for online publishing efforts that benefit community members, students, research partners, and faculty.

This lightning round presentation addresses the role of the community in relation to open access publishing of interdisciplinary research that brings together the humanities and social sciences. We will discuss how the principles of knowledge equity are embedded throughout the press from the use of Creative Commons licenses and Traditional Knowledge labels to the open peer review processes that reflect community voices in publishing. We will also share how ICER Press accommodates many digital and print formats as well as creative outputs in order to foster innovative and inclusive publishing efforts in its commitment to alternative academic publishing practices that embrace emergent multimodal efforts to reflect stakeholder innovations.

ICER Press has gone through a significant redesign in 2021 to strengthen its infrastructure and enhance its capacity to publish and mobilize community-engaged research founded on the principles of social justice.

Dufresne, Kelsey & Vandegrift, Micah (North Carolina State U) “The Digital, the Multimodal, & the Fermentable: Public Knowledge Sharing with Fermentology”

Fermentology, a mini-lecture series focusing on the science, culture, and history of all fermentable and fermented foods, is expanding and shifting from a prioritization of the traditional lecture model of knowledge sharing — to one that explores multimodal user interactivity and engagement with scholarship. More specifically, Fermentology’s mini-lectures, originally shared and disseminated through live presentation on Zoom broadcast on Youtube, are now documented, re-presented and enriched as published/public works including a transcription of the talk with new infographics, tables, interactive images, podcasts, videos, and more — all in efforts to increase the access of knowledge sharing through differentiation and multimodality. In doing so, Fermentology’s mini-lectures take on a new form that shifts autonomy and agency from just the scientist, scholar, researcher, and expert to include that of the learner, reader, and public also.

Moreover, this project is rooted in collaboration between researchers, content creators, librarians, and students — as members of the Open Knowledge Center, we utilize the production work of Fermentology to introduce open scholarship principles and practices to graduate research assistants that work with us. Following examples we observe in the digital humanities, we invite graduate students into the messy middle of knowledge production, training them not just in tools and platforms but in approaches, methods, and workflows for public/scholarly engagement, all while striving to align the work of knowledge production and dissemination with our shared exploration of a better, more just, and more equitable ways of collaboration.

Harkema, Craig; Dase, Kyle; & Nelson, Brent (U Saskatchewan), “Gaining Perspective: Data Visualization as Prototyping of the Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities”

The Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities (SNEMCC) is a project engaged in the encoding of various seventeenth-century catalogues of curiosity into machine-readable XML and the subsequent presentation of data derived from those encoded documents into social network visualizations.

SNEMCC aims to put the Go-Pro on the object, to follow the object through various events in the collection process to build network graphs that better understand how social networks in the “culture of curiosity” developed and functioned in early modern England and how these material objects facilitated this relational network. In our paper, we share our experience in developing the ontology for this project and the challenges in creating an ontology that is both suited to our project’s needs while being general and flexible enough to connect with other Early Modern social network projects in the future. Specifically, we demonstrate how the use of visualizations (both analogue and digital) aided the development of our ontology and clarified our needs in terms of the framework’s role in facilitating the presentation of our data in social network visualizations. This visualization focus needed to be balanced against our concerns about manipulating the data to serve our own outcomes or preconceived notions about what the data should look like. This paper will provide insight into the process of using visualizations as an iterative development process and not simply as an end-product for conveying research results.

Jensen, Graham (UVic) “Designing Digital Commons to Support Open Social Scholarship”

Scholarly communities have been gathering and connecting in virtual spaces for years on platforms such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Mendeley, known variously as digital research commons, digital scholarly commons, and academic social network sites (Winter et al. 2020). In the last decade, critics have paid increased attention to the ways that the design of these platforms plays a role in mediating academics’ increasingly networked relationships—to students (Gold 2011), other academics (Adema and Hall 2015), libraries and interested members of the public (Glass 2018), and bad actors (Fitzpatrick 2021; McMillan Cottom 2017). However, from this growing body of scholarship, new questions have also emerged about the embeddedness of new technologies—including those aligned with the ideals of open social scholarship—in larger institutional, disciplinary, and national contexts. How might design factor into discussions of how digital research commons support open access publishing or open peer review, for example, while also addressing concerns about the relative prestige, academic rigour, or security of open scholarly practices? How does the design of digital commons contribute to, or resist, the exploitation of researchers and research data (Duffy and Pooley 2017)? This presentation will briefly examine possible answers to these and other questions, with particular focus on how not-for-profit sites such as the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons are using design to reflect shared, continuously evolving community values. In the process, it will invite further dialogue—and critical consideration—of design and its potential to positively reimagine scholarly communication, activity, and engagement.

Jensen, Graham & Jesperson, Talya (UVic) “New Pastures: Expanding the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons”

The Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons is a national-scale, online research commons in both official languages (hsscommons.ca). As a not-for-profit alternative to popular academic social networking sites such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, it will foster an open environment for Canadian HSS researchers to share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. It is an initiative of the INKE Partnership, and project partners include Compute Canada, CANARIE, UVic Systems, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the US-based Humanities Commons, with additional support from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN–RCDR), the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), Edith Cowan University, Érudit, Iter, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and UVic Libraries. The Canadian HSS Commons platform itself includes a subject repository for open access publications that assigns digital object identifiers (DOIs) upon upload and follows FAIR guidelines for data management; a project development environment that can integrate with Google Drive, Dropbox, or Github; individual user profiles, with federated login/identity authorization, including with ORCID; blogging capabilities; subject interest groups; tools to facilitate member interactions (e.g., profile building, and messaging); and more.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of some of these features as well as an update on our ongoing user testing and onboarding work, which we have been carrying out in consultation with members of the INKE Partnership, CAPOS, and HSS communities and scholarly societies and projects in Canada. The presenters will discuss how, together, these groups are growing the Canadian HSS Commons from within while also considering the ways this kind of digital infrastructure can make research accessible to new audiences in a variety of national, disciplinary, and non-academic contexts.

Finger, Anke (U Connecticut) & Kuhn, Virginia (U Southern California) “Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities”

Digital dissertations have been a part of academic research for years now, yet there are still many questions surrounding their processes. Are interactive dissertations significantly different from their paper-based counterparts? What are the effects of digital projects on doctoral education? How does one choose and defend a digital dissertation? This book explores the wider implications of digital scholarship across institutional, geographic, and disciplinary divides.

This lightning talk presents a new volume on born-digital dissertations that is arranged in two sections: the first, written by senior scholars, addresses conceptual concerns regarding the direction and assessment of digital dissertations in the broader context of doctoral education. The second section consists of case studies by PhD students whose research resulted in a natively digital dissertation that they have successfully defended. These early-career researchers have been selected to represent a range of disciplines and institutions.

Despite the profound effect of incorporated digital tools on dissertations, the literature concerning them is limited. Our book aims to provide a fresh, up-to-date view on the digital dissertation, considering the newest technological advances. It is especially relevant in the European context where digital dissertations, mostly in arts-based research, are more popular.

Shaping the Digital Dissertation aims to provide insights, precedents and best practices to graduate students, doctoral advisors, institutional agents, and dissertation committees. As digital dissertations have a potential impact on the state of research as a whole, this edited collection will be a useful resource for the wider academic community and anyone interested in the future of doctoral studies.

Maxwell, John (Simon Fraser U) “The Care-ful Reviewer: Peer Review as if People Mattered”

Peer review is typically seen as the very hallmark of scholarly communication, the point of distinction between serious, research-informed publishing and less-trustworthy, ephemeral, or even spurious sources. Most scholars support the general idea of peer review in general and will defend at least some version of it. And yet, a closer examination of peer review practices and indeed a growing literature around peer review’s role in scholarly communication reveals peer review as a kind of black box concealing a tangle of differing rationales, spectres, and imagined standards, sometimes mutually incompatible. Peer review, it would appear, is not monolithic, despite how we often talk about it; indeed scholarly communities would do well to come to a more explicit agreement about what they mean by peer review and what exactly they want it to do. And so, in the context of open social scholarship as it has been defined by the INKE community in recent years, what do we want peer review to be, and to do for us? This essay proposes a version of peer review that places care and care ethics at the centre of its operations, serving a more “generous” (Fitzpatrick 2019) model of scholarship that values people and relationships.

Meneses, Luis (Vancouver Island U), “Maintaining Open Digital Scholarship Infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities”

Online technologies have provided researchers with greater opportunities to collaborate and create different projects. These projects are computationally robust require a significant amount of maintenance, which helps preserve the approaches and the unique visions of the research teams. The convenience and familiarity of computational methods can make us forget that there is a fragility associated with our online tools. In turn, this fragility is a threat to the completeness and sustainability of our research outputs over time.

Over time, great strides have been made to harness and manage the fragility of open, online resources. For example, addressing the potential reconstruction of digital assets (Klein, Ware, and Nelson 2011), and the overall decay of websites (Bar-Yossef et al. 2004). Nevertheless, and despite these previous efforts, managing and sustaining online environments over time is a complex problem, made more complex when they are not static objects but rather dynamic thriving collaborative spaces.

Open, digital scholarship is significant as a mechanism of Canada’s growing digital scholarly infrastructure for facilitating public access and engagement with research. How do we do this in ways that speak to the needs of our communities, and are open, effective, and sustainable? This presentation will expand on these points, emphasizing the importance and the difficulties of maintaining open infrastructures over time. Furthermore, Open digital infrastructures have become increasingly important during the ongoing global pandemic, which has led to the postponement of many academic conferences and hindered opportunities to engage with our research that we used to take for granted.

Pfeffer, Magnus (Stuttgart Media U); Kacsuk, Zoltan (Stuttgart Media U); Schroff, Simone (U Plymouth); & and Roth, Martin (Ritsumeikan U), “Harmonizing Open Licenses among Online Databases of Enthusiast Communities: Challenges Encountered in the Legal Integration of Databases in the Japanese Visual Media Graph Project”

The Japanese Visual Media Graph (JVMG) project has created a graph database for researchers working on popular Japanese visual media by combining data compiled by various enthusiast online communities. In order to be able to open up the graph database for researchers to use worldwide, the legal integration of the involved databases was also necessary. This paper discusses the hurdles we encountered in this integration process.

First, the legal protection of databases is a complex affair that can involve traditional copyright protection, sui generis database rights, or even contractual obligations based on the license and the jurisdiction concerned. Secondly, despite the documentation available on various open licenses, navigating the intricacies of copyright law, database rights and their application is mostly beyond the grasp of non-experts. However, this is not immediately evident based on the documentation and the presentation of various open licenses. This leads to the third problem, namely that well-intentioned communities might actually create either legal inconsistencies or unintended barriers in relation to the use of their data. And finally, there are almost as many database licensing practices and solutions as there are enthusiast communities creating datasets online.

In this presentation we provide a detailed overview of all of these problems and discuss the solution we employed in the case of the JVMG project as an example for potential best practices in relation to the legal integration of databases with varying licenses for the promotion of open science.

Saklofske, Jon (U Acadia), “Open Social Pedagogy: Modelling Foundational OSS Values in the University Classroom”

Identifying, acknowledging, and promoting open social scholarship (OSS) methods and practices in humanities research and scholarly communication is at the heart of the INKE SSHRC partnership (INKE.ca). However, establishing and anchoring OSS in a tradition of scholarly practice means that the classroom is a crucial space for the promotion of OSS values in future researchers. To that end, how do our educational and evaluative practices need to change to make more room for OSS methods, practices, and perspectives, and to enable scholars to imagine themselves otherwise? This involves not just developing courses or assignments that feature OSS ideas and projects as content and example, but braiding OSS values into the very fabric of the construction and purpose of a course. What, exactly, are these values? In “Modelling Open Scholarship”, Alyssa Arbuckle and John Maxwell list the following “core virtues and values” as being at the heart of OSS: collaboration, ‘ongoingness’, durability and citability, archiving and access, inquiry, dialogue, knowledge mobilization, engagement, and abundance (5). While these are necessary practices and motivations at the heart of OSS work, I would argue that there are more fundamental values underlying such goals: responsibility, kindness, mentorship, respect, acknowledgement, trust, generosity, gratitude, openness, humility, and selfless curiosity. Without implementing such foundational values early on via unconventional pedagogical practices, OSS intentions will always fight against learned antagonistic habits and exclusive, competitive paradigms of scholarly perception and practice that are reinforced by traditional academic economies. To this end, I’ve recently sought to renovate my pedagogical practice by implementing a “pedagogy of kindness” approach (Denial) and incorporating “ungrading” methods (Kohn & Blum) in my courses. Many of the motivational ideas at the heart of these classroom experiments are usefully aligned with OSS motivations and values. In this paper, I will discuss a number of fundamental ways that the tone and goals of teaching and learning can be productively recalibrated toward OSS values.

Smith, Rosalind & Whitelaw, Mitchell (Australian National U) “Reimagining (and Redesigning) the First Line Index: The Early Modern Women’s Complaint Index”

The recently released Early Modern Women’s Complaint Index is a first and last-line digital index of female-authored complaint poetry in English and Scots from 1530 to 1680, presenting the data from a larger collaborative project exploring how women used complaint for expressions of love, loss and protest. It brings together bibliographic information and data about the content of the poems, inviting users to explore the materials that underpin the complaint project and linking out to open data. This paper argues for the reimagination of the bibliographic tool of the index in the digital environment, as a prompt for new scholarship, a way of sharing project findings, and of breaking down the boundaries between traditional and non-traditional research outputs. We also advocate for the redesign of the first line index as a visual and textual form. As the Index shows, generous interfaces to first-line indexes open new modes of exploration and interaction, and provide tools for close and distant investigation.

Sumner, Tyne Daile (U Melbourne), “The Australian Cultural Data Engine: ‘Putting cultural data to work’”

This lightning talk will cover some of the aims, key research questions, and early exploratory work of the Australian Research Council-funded project: The Australian Cultural Data Engine for Research, Industry and Government (ACD-E), based at the University of Melbourne with collaborators across Australia and the UK. The ACD-E is a collaborative open software engineering project designed to interact with leading existing cultural databases in architecture, visual and performing arts, humanities, and heritage to bridge to information and social sciences. The talk will briefly consider how the coordinated extraction and analysis of information from arts databases within Australia has the potential to contribute to policy debates, cultural reform, and new ways of understanding and influencing mainstream forms of consumption. It will also touch on some of the strategies for public engagement and shared-knowledge that the ACD-E is undertaking as well as the ways in which the project has sought to involve Graduate Researchers and Early Career Academics in the exploratory and experimental use of Australian cultural data in novel, iterative and mutually beneficial ways.