Abstracts

Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada

Monday June 17th – Tuesday June 18th, 2024

Keynote Speakers

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (Michigan State U), “Open Infrastructures for the Future of Knowledge Production”

Decades of work have gone into the development of platforms for scholarly communication that are designed to facilitate the greatest possible openness for circulating the knowledge that scholars and practitioners produce today. The goal of many of these platforms has been returning control of the processes of scholarly communication to scholars and their institutions, breaking the corporate stranglehold on the dissemination of knowledge. Those platforms, however, frequently depend on infrastructures that are similarly corporate-owned and controlled. As a result, the long-term sustainability of scholarly work relies at the deepest levels on the continued interest and goodwill of infrastructure providers (such as Amazon Web Services) whose goals and values are radically different from our own. This talk will explore what our dependence on corporate communications infrastructures may mean for the future of scholarly communication, as well as ways that academic institutions might become better able to take control of their own infrastructural needs.

Bengtson, Jonathan (U Victoria), “‘In this house join, Minting new coin’: Libraries and Knowledge Production in 21st Century Scholarship”

The ever-increasing pace of technological development continues to have profound impact, both positive and negative, on the health and well-being of humanity and our environment. Whilst there are elements of this impact that are discipline specific, much is common to all and hard-won insight in one domain may be of great value to other domains. The locus of university libraries at the intersection of disciplines ideally situates them to facilitate collaboration and engagement between and across domains, creating new opportunities to address global issues and assimilate new technologies to enhance scholarly processes. Libraries are designed to evolve and transform. Fundamentally, they are places of innovation and collaboration. No longer simply repositories for the products of research, modern academic libraries are at the nexus of an increasingly complex international network of research creation, dissemination, mobilization, and preservation. Through their many local, regional, national, and international connections, academic libraries leverage collections, expertise, and infrastructure within rapidly shifting contexts full of ambiguity and necessitating much flexibility. Academic libraries exist within a higher education environment that continues to experience significant global change and disruption driven by multiple factors, the most salient of which is the transition to a rapidly evolving digital knowledge economy. The library’s long-standing trusted role in enabling access to and preserving knowledge is enhanced by a focus on opening new avenues to research, systems, and structures; engaging actively with stakeholders, including marginalized and under-represented communities; and adopting sustainable and enduring approaches to core research and learning activities. As the university’s academic commons, libraries are platforms for digital transformation, providing the physical and digital spaces, expertise, access to knowledge, and convening power to accelerate transdisciplinary research and build intellectual community. As such academic libraries are catalysts for creative approaches to scholarship. Exactly how this manifests within institutions will be determined by multiple factors within and beyond institutional and disciplinary confines. Each of our research libraries will need to leverage their strengths and strike a fine balance between their unique and evolving positions within their home institutions and the broader research milieu. This featured talk will focus on how this process is evolving at the University of Victoria and provide insights into the repositioning of academic libraries within the lifecycle of research production.

Lightning Talks

van Bellen, Simon (Érudit), “Exploring the ecosystem of Canadian HSS journals and the role they play in national knowledge dissemination”

The number of active Canadian scholarly journals in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) is currently estimated at 500 to 600 (Larivière et al., 2021). National HSS journals play a particular role in the dissemination of knowledge, because of the specificity of the research objects presented and the relative importance of French as opposed to English (Larivière, 2018). These journals are characterized by a not-for-profit approach, a predominance of (diamond) open access and strong links with universities and societies. Many journals currently face challenges of varying nature: maintaining compliance with the latest open access requirements, retaining workforce for editing, securing support from hosting institutions and developing national and international visibility. In addition, increasing numbers of researchers in HSS favour publishing in ‘high impact’ international journals, driven by incentives for international-oriented research and collaborations abroad. Using bibliometrics, we specify the role of national journals for different communities of Canadian researchers. What is the nature of the research objects? How do they contribute to the prevalence of open access in Canada? Why do researchers choose to publish in these journals rather than international or commercial ones? Which are the benefits of these journals for the circulation of scientific knowledge in Canada?

Brown, Susan, and Kim Martin (U Guelph), “Exploring Contexts: Layering Linked Data on the Web”

One of the beauties of linked open data (LOD) is that it can travel.

It is highly structured, granular, and designed to interoperate with other data. Most LOD sites are walled gardens for exploring data within a particular platform. Even vast collections like Wikidata and Europeana assume that users will come to the data through a bespoke interface. Although most installations provide SPARQL endpoints, SPARQL queries are beyond the ken of most humanities scholars, and designed for downloading data rather than using it on the Web. LOD, however, is intended for use across a wide range of web interfaces and contexts (Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila 2001).

`LINCS is experimenting with providing LOD in situ, creating a layer of context on top of a web page. This is a contrast to contextualizing hyperlinks, which take the user away from the content they were engaged with.

The LINCS Context Explorer allows users to contextualize web content with information about cultural entities found in LINCS data. A bilingual browser plugin and software library, it scans pages for possible entities and highlights them on the page. Users then match a highlight to a known LINCS entity to expose its properties in a sidebar. Although they can click through to more information in ResearchSpace, the Explorer aims to keep users on the original page.

This design principle of taking the data to the user rather than directing the user to the data will benefit research projects, journals, and memory institutions: users literally stay with the originating site but can expand their understanding of what’s on the page. Because the LOD is a separate layer of data, collection data published by GLAM institutions can be enriched and contextualized without having to be modified. The Context Explorer can provide the kind of context essential to remediating problematic data online, including the legacies of colonialism, slavery, racism, and sexism, and provide the situated perspectives based on domain expertise (Haraway 1988).

Clark, Jessica (Érudit) and Jason Friedman (CRKN), “The Partnership for Open Access: Diamond OA in/for Canada”

The Partnership for Open Access (POA) has been a successful, Canadian model for investing in open access since 2014 and is a driver of Diamond Open Access (OA) in Canada. As Érudit and CRKN collectively build toward the next phase of this partnership, Jessica Clark (Senior Coordinator, Open Access Development, Érudit) and Jason Friedman (Senior Manager, Heritage Services, CRKN) will look at the impact the POA has had in Canada and how it aligns with a global movement in support of Diamond OA. They will also discuss the future of POA and highlight how sustained investments in Canadian journals will increase open access in Canada.

Colin-Arce, Alan (U Victoria), Caroline Winter (U Victoria), Maggie Sardino (King’s College London), Alyssa Arbuckle (U Victoria), Graham Jensen (U Victoria), and Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “Surveying the Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Knowledge Diversity”

Knowledge diversity is an epistemological perspective that recognizes the legitimacy and value of a wide range of ways of knowing. The “Knowledge Diversity Research Scan” developed at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab attempts to synthesize ideas and initiatives that challenge the academy’s systemic privileging of dominant colonial perspectives. The highlighted resources address the exclusion and erasure of the lived experiences and expertise of Indigenous peoples, non-native English speakers, and community members, which similarly reinforces colonial and capitalist notions of knowledge.
This scan details the historical and present issues faced by people in their capacity as knowers. It also highlights ways of knowing that are often disregarded as illegitimate for lacking rigor or intellectual value according to Eurocentric epistemological frameworks that systemically devalue and dismiss Indigenous knowledges and community-based research.
The research scan offers an overview of five themes in knowledge diversity: epistemic injustice, bibliodiversity, Indigenous knowledges, community knowledge and co-inquiry, and the promotion of knowledge equity in research methodology, education, and GLAM institutions. Scholarship and initiatives in these themes provide a theoretical foundation and practical examples of various approaches to knowledge diversity that explore ways of organizing and producing knowledge within and beyond academia. These efforts to generate localized, culturally embedded, and/or co-produced knowledge recognize that there is not one universally valid way of knowing, but rather there are multiple forms of advancing understanding.

Crompton, Constance (U Ottawa), “Clustering Collections, Mobilizing Metadata: Library and Archives Canada Public Workshops”

How can we use open social scholarship principles to foster data literacy, community enthusiasm and historical engagement? The INKE training cluster is studying the development and best practices in the teaching and mentorship through the initiatives of our cluster members, partner organizations, and public-facing Digital Humanities initiatives beyond (Arbuckle, 2020). In spring 2023, we welcomed a postdoctoral fellow to the team to lead controlled-observation and interview-based studies of mentorship and training practices in North American digital humanities training initiatives and public workshops and outreach in partnership with Library and Archives Canada (LAC). This paper will report of early experiments in targeted LAC collections and metadata mobilization research using open social scholarship principles.

Dowson, Rebecca, Alison J. Moore, Joey Takeda, and Andrew Gardener (Simon Fraser U), “Beyond the start up: Sustainable approaches to Open Social Scholarship”

As collaborative and co-creative research, digital humanities project development can enable open social scholarship and public humanities research. But to effectively build community around a DH project, long-term commitments must be made not only to the projects themselves, but to teams and relationships. The Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) is a small unit within SFU Library’s Research Commons that collaborates with researchers in planning and developing digital humanities projects. Like many DH labs, the DHIL formed as a kind of grassroots collaboration where multiple people doing similar things and needing similar resources advocated for a concerted effort. Since 2017, the DHIL has developed over 20 projects in partnership with researchers at all levels and wide disciplinary backgrounds. In this time lab members, project teams, research directions, and technological environments have shifted significantly. A pressing example of the latter is the 14 projects that share a common and ageing infrastructure. While leveraging a shared infrastructure allowed for rapid development of new projects during the incubation of the DHIL, it has also limited our ability to upgrade projects incrementally. Instead of upgrading all 14 projects, we have taken this opportunity to think critically about our purpose, mission, and approach to developing and maintaining digital humanities projects. Moving away from a one size fits all approach, we have adopted a multi-faceted strategy that makes best use of resources; accounts for the multiple stages of a digital projects (active, dormant, abandoned, finished); and reflects both the lab’s values and expertise as well as shifting paradigms of web development. In this presentation, we will outline our strategy for streamlining these 14 projects into three new categories—projects to upgrade, projects to staticize, and projects to migrate—and discuss the technical, administrative, and social documentation and processes that these approaches require.

Duncan, Claire and Angela Joosse (CRKN), “Creativity in Action: CRKN’s Approach to Modernizing Digitized Documentary Heritage”

Over the past twenty years, research priorities, areas of interest, and technology have evolved incredibly quickly. The Canadiana collections, hosted by CRKN, were developed in an era where the main goal was to put traditional historical primary source materials online. It requires significant creativity to pivot from the online reading interfaces of the recent past to a contemporary experience responsive to the evolution of AI and the demands of digital scholarship. In this lightning talk, we will talk our forays into new technology, and our work to improve representation in our collections. We will also provide an update on our transformative vision of the future from the perspective of a non-profit member organization.

Jensen, Graham, Caroline Winter, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “Understanding and Articulating Knowledge Mobilization in the Humanities”

Thinking about knowledge mobilization in the humanities offers an opportunity to critique the institutional and cultural infrastructures that demand quantification of impact as a proxy for value. Additionally, doing so allows us to consider critically the nature of humanities research, the knowledge it generates, and its pathway through the world. However, measuring knowledge mobilization in the humanities is a difficult task not least because knowledge mobilization’s theories, definitions, and best practices have been largely developed in the sciences, but also because the pipeline from research to practice in the humanities is less clear than in the sciences. The complexity and heterogeneity of humanities research and knowledge makes drawing generalizations about its use and value challenging, but it also presents an opportunity to reflect upon the ways that research and the generation of new knowledge—the research endeavour—affects us all. In this presentation, we discuss the “Knowledge Mobilization in the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Scan” developed at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, which offers a foundation to begin understanding knowledge mobilization in the humanities. The research scan consists of three parts: 1) definitions and foundations; 2) the praxis of knowledge mobilization; and 3) knowledge mobilization resources, tools, and guides. As a whole, the scan reveals the myriad ways in which humanities knowledge can be put into action, as well as how this knowledge has value within and beyond academia.

Jensen, Graham, Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “A Digital Commons Space for the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences”

The Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons is an in-development community space for academics, research partners and stakeholders, students, and interested members of the public (hsscommons.ca). Serving as a hub for open social scholarship, it combines elements of social networking sites, tools for collaboration, and institutional repositories, allowing researchers to freely share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. It is an initiative of the INKE Partnership, with project partners in Canada, Australia, and the United States—including the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship, the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, the University of Newcastle, Western Sydney University, the University of Victoria, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, CANARIE, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Humanities Commons, and others.

This lightning talk will include highlights from the project’s ongoing community-building efforts with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In line with the program theme for Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship, the talk will provide a brief overview of some of the ways that members of the INKE Partnership community have begun to use the Canadian HSS Commons in both expected and unexpected ways as a tool for open social scholarship. As our recent collaborations demonstrate, we are interested not only in continuing to study the theoretical underpinnings of digital research commons, but also in testing and documenting our own experiments in open social scholarship of various kinds (e.g., journal publishing and archiving, event organization, and content management involving complex access and file-sharing scenarios). By sharing these experiments with the larger communities to which we belong—both in Canada and abroad—we hope to contribute to ongoing as well as nascent conversations about how open digital research infrastructure and tools can be leveraged to redefine HSS research and its possible applications.

Jones, Julie (Simon Fraser U), “Making scholarship social: Thesis Writing Retreats at an academic library”

SFU Library’s Research Commons has facilitated thirty-five Thesis Writing Retreats (initially known as Thesis Boot Camp) since 2013. These three-day, in-person writing intensives are a collaborative effort between Research Commons librarians and Graduate Writing Services and are an innovative approach to supporting graduate students from across disciplines in thesis-writing, and, more broadly, to graduate student education. Over the course of three days, through facilitated discussions and knowledge creation activities, inclusive teaching practices, non-technologically mediated connection, structured time, and social spaces, a Thesis Writing Retreat opens up the process of scholarship and makes it something deeply social. This brief talk will outline some of the ways this is achieved and detail positive impacts of the event.

Kaoukakis, Constantine and Brent Nelson (U Saskatchewan), with Jesse Sharpe (Houghton U), Matthew Sherman (Drexel U), Joel Salt (U Saskatchewan), and Kyle Dase (U Victoria), “Gauging Library Support for Independent Open Access Publication of the John Donne Journal”

At the INKE conference last year in Victoria, the Prototyping the Digital Archive team reported on its exploration of options for an open access expression of the John Donne Journal, an established journal founded in 1982 that is published as a cloth-bound annual and has never been published electronically. One condition of this move to open access is that the Journal retain, at least for the medium term, its ability to produce the print volume and also protect, to a significant degree, its revenue stream from library subscriptions. One of our proposed models is an independent approach whereby libraries support our journal as an open access initiative analogous to subscription, wherein they would have the option of continuing to receive the print journal while supporting, in parallel, diamond open access publication. The risk here is that there is no financial incentive for libraries to continue paying for what their users can access for free. Thus, ours is an entirely ethical appeal. Will it work? This presentation will report the results of our first attempt to gauge the viability of this approach. In order not to risk our current subscriber base, we begin our consultations with libraries that were once subscribers but are so no longer. For each of these eighty libraries, we have identified one acquisitions librarian and one open access librarian (or ally in a different role) and are sending them a short survey asking, in the first instance, whether they believe their library would be willing to sign on as a subscriber/patron of the John Donne Journal as an independent publishing venture in diamond open access. We also ask whether the availably of the print volume might be an asset and what a reasonable level of support might look like. Finally, pointing them to our article, we end by asking them, “As an open access ally, do you have any insights or advice to share in this approach to funding independent open access journal publication?” Our presentation will present our survey, our rationale, and analysis of the results.

Martin, Shawn (Dartmouth Library), “The Violence of Open Access”

Open access held the promise of liberating scholarship from the confines of the past and to make it freely accessible to all, regardless of one’s position within existing hierarchies. Despite these ideals, current forms of open scholarly publishing continue to be dominated by many of the same actors that have been historically advantaged and has continued to marginalize voices within disadvantaged communities. Why? Johan Galtung’s framework for peace studies may help to explain why open scholarship seems not to have lived up to previous promises. By recognizing the “violent” narratives within which academic publishing is placed and by changing those underlying narratives, it may be possible to create a better way forward.

Mauro, Aaron (Brock U), “Building Resilient Open Scholarship Ecosystems with Enhanced Cybersecurity”

In INKE’s evolving conversation on open and social scholarship, cybersecurity emerges as a critical concern in the areas of policy and training, particularly in the context of social engineering threats. This lightning talk will sketch some of the intricacies of cybersecurity within the framework of open scholarship, challenging traditional methods that exploit human emotions and behaviors for security breaches. It highlights the ethical dilemmas and long-term ineffectiveness of such approaches, which often overlook the diversity and emotional intelligence of individuals. The recent emphasis on research security policies in Canada shifts from an attacker-centric perspective to a defender-oriented approach, advocating for humanistic strategies that enhance emotional maturity and observational acumen among cybersecurity professionals and end-users.

The lightning talk will emphasize the prevalent use of phishing simulations, scrutinizing their ethical implications and questioning their efficacy in a real-world setting. The discussion underscores the significance of emotional labour, by proposing that a toxic work environment amplifies vulnerability to social engineering tactics. I will argue for a paradigm shift in cybersecurity practices within open scholarship environments, promoting a model that prioritizes equity, emotional intelligence, and empowerment over exploitation and fear.

By advocating for a more inclusive and emotionally aware cybersecurity strategy, I hope to contribute to the broader discourse on creating safer, more resilient open scholarship ecosystems. I hope to spur a re-evaluation of current practices, urging for a balanced integration of technical skills and emotional insights to combat the sophisticated landscape of cyber threats. This approach not only enhances the security posture of open scholarship platforms but also fosters a culture of trust, respect, and shared responsibility among its participants.

Maxwell, John (Simon Fraser U), “Aldus and the Mystery of the Missing Labour”

Aldus@SFU is a project to digitally remediate the Wosk-McDonald Aldine Collection at SFU Library: 106 volumes from Renaissance Venice. In designing this project, one of our key goals was to highlight the labour contributed by all of our collaborators: grad students, librarians, RAs, digitization staff, programmers, designers, and other colleagues. The object of our study, the 16th-century press of humanist publisher Aldus Manutius, was similarly a collaborative enterprise, combining the talents of editors, scholars, pressmen, metalsmiths, sales agents, and so on. But history records very few of these contributors as identifiable individuals: Aldus himself takes almost all of the credit, except for a handful of celebrity editors (e.g., Pietro Bembo) and the punchcutter Francesco Griffo. Bibliographic study and our reading of the history of printing and typography reveals significant identifiable contributions from unnamed workers: how can we properly account for this labour, so thoroughly effaced from the story of this pivotal humanist publishing project? The lesson posed by this challenge — and which inspires our own project — is that ‘openness’ has to rely on inclusion.

Moynihan, Bridget (U Ottawa, St Francis Xavier U, LAC/BAC), “Openly Structured: Supporting Open Social Scholarship in an INKE Postdoctoral Fellowship”

This paper will highlight the open social scholarship projects that shaped my INKE postdoctoral fellowship (May 2023-2024), as well as reflect on what helped to make these projects effective and what they can gesture to in future directions for open social scholarship opportunities. Open social scholarship refers to “academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways” (Arbuckle and Siemens, 2023). In line with this definition, my postdoctoral fellowship has worked to build connection and engagement with multiple publics, including by helping to head the editorial work for a special issue of the Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) open-access journal; leading the design of a national survey on the digital humanities workshops training environment; and curating a series of expert panels on topics related to humanities data for Library and Archives Canada and their affiliated stakeholders. In addition to emphasizing these projects’ participation in open social scholarship, I highlight them as case studies that demonstrate the value of creating a balance between structured support and openness for creativity in mentorship and training roles (Wang and Shibayama, 2022), even at the postdoctoral level. I assert that working with the implicit tensions involved in finding this balance and ensuring means of offering this openly structured support are crucial to ensuring that open social scholarship can continue to develop and flourish.

Paveck, Hannah and Sara El Rayes (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), “Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences”

With the global movement towards Open Access (OA), what does the future of scholarly book publishing look like in Canada? How can we ensure equitable, sustainable OA policies and practices that reflect the perspectives of all disciplines? This presentation will centre on a recent initiative by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In April 2023 the Federation introduced changes to its flagship book funding program, launching two supplemental grants to support and incentivize OA publishing. The presentation will first situate this initiative within the OA policy environment here in Canada and internationally, before focusing in on lessons learned. One year in, what can this Federation initiative tell us about the opportunities and challenges surrounding OA and the future of scholarly books in our disciplines?

Saklofske, Jon, and Diane Chin (Acadia U), “It takes a village to raise the dead: Creating an interactive social network of graveyard inhabitants through community collaboration and open social scholarship practice”

Underground Networks is an in-progress prototype experience designed as part of the INKE community cluster’s Virtual Realizations, Playable Archives project, which explores ways to interactively engage broader publics with the wonders and challenges of humanities knowledge, research, and research communication. Simply, this experience will allow visitors to interactively text message the inhabitants of a 260-year-old cemetery in Wolfville, Nova Scotia onsite or remotely via a social media interface. More than just a way of bringing visitors into curated conversational contact with the history of the community, this will encourage users to critically reflect on the social politics and hierarchies that graveyards preserve, replicate, and extend, and to question the absence of certain voices and histories from cemetery spaces more broadly. More significantly, though, the development of this project has been framed by the values of open social scholarship. In all aspects of project planning, we have centralised and collaboratively included community members, town employees, university archivists, tour guides, descendants of gravesite inhabitants, local historians, and the Wolfville Historical Society. It is being used to rejuvenate waning interest in the stewardship of local town history, to advocate for the preservation and restoration of a neglected heritage site to the Wolfville town council and the Provincial Government of Nova Scotia, and to redefine and reinvigorate a local museum as a central tourist hub for historical experiences. Our hope is to offer this project’s model of community engagement as a template for transformative scholarly practices that braid research creation with open social scholarship.

Salt, Joel (U Saskatchewan) and Kyle Dase (U Victoria), with Brent Nelson (U Saskatchewan), Jesse Sharpe (Houghton U), Matthew Sherman (Drexel U), and Constantine Kaoukakis (U Saskatchewan), “‘Any Addition to Knowledge’: Creating an Open-Source Database from John R. Roberts Annotated Bibliography of John Donne”

One of the life-long projects of the celebrated critic John R. Roberts was the detailed and expansive 4 volume set of the John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism covering the years 1912-2008, a resource which continues to be invaluable for scholars of John Donne, but one currently limited by the limitations of print. This paper will cover the various processes the Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan along with Prototyping the Digital Archive team underwent to move the content of the print volumes into a sustainable open-source database using a content management system (Drupal) to improve accessibility and functionality, as well as interoperability with other new online Donne digital projects. Topics covered might include: the creation of csv files from text documents mined from OCR’d scans using regular expressions to structure data in a way to allow bulk ingestion scripts to load entries, metadata schema creation, data normalization and standardization, coalescing disparate (over 4 unique volumes) print indices to function cohesively using Drupal taxonomies, and aligning data to work with nomenclature created for the Donne Variorum project. Additionally, the potential not just to remediate, but to improve existing and add additional annotated entries will be an important part of this project. We are looking to create a robust interface for quality-controlled user-submitted annotations for entries Roberts missed, or for new entries post-2008, including material in other languages and new media (i.e. blog posts), bringing the annotated bibliography fully into the 21st century.

Siemens, Lynne (U Victoria), “INKE and Collaboration: Year 2”

Building on earlier research about collaboration in an open social scholarship project (Siemens 2023), this paper examines the Implementing New Knowledge Environment’s second year of collaborating with academic and academic-adjacent researchers and partners. Using yearly interviews with team members, it will reflect on the nature of collaboration, its advantages and disadvantages, and measures of success. The paper will also include some exploration on collaboration in the age of COVID.

Takeda, Joey (Simon Fraser U), Sydney Lines (U British Columbia), Leean Wu (U British Columbia), “‘Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!’: Preserving Early Hollywood Archives and Enacting Social Scholarship with the Winnifred Eaton Archive”

The Winnifred Eaton Archive (WEA) is an fully searchable digital scholarly edition of the collected works of Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve, an early Chinese Canadian author now best known for the popular Japanese romances she signed “Onoto Watanna” in the early twentieth century. While often credited as one of the founders of Asian American literature, Eaton is seldom recognized as an important scenarist and screenwriter in early Hollywood (Chapman and Lines, 2023). Over the last four years, the WEA has sought to bring Eaton’s Hollywood work to the foreground and, drawing on the existing collection of Eaton’s works held at the University of Calgary as well as the project’s archival research, the WEA now hosts dozens of Eaton’s cinematic texts (screenplays, scenarios, adaptations) and film-related documents (interoffice memos, correspondence). Taken together, these texts not only enrich our understanding of Eaton’s oeuvre, but also provide crucial insight into the dynamic and highly social modes of production that constituted the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, which, as we suggest, serve as something of a prototype for collaborative digital scholarship today. As Steven Price asserts, the screenplay “presents a nexus of multiple possibilities generated by a plethora of writers” (232), and, indeed, the notion of the individual author is challenged by screenwriting practice, which, like contemporary digital scholarship, is often collaborative, with both visible and invisible writing and editing happening at various stages. Taking Eaton’s early Hollywood paper trail as a case study in the challenges of collaboration, we aim to 1) highlight the perils of closed/invisible collaborative practices; 2) advocate for the preservation of early Hollywood papers; and 3) outline how the project has engaged multiple publics as active and open producers of the digital archive rather than as passive spectators of the work produced.

Wadhwa, Soni (SRM U, Andhra Pradesh) and Tanveer Hasan (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore), “Addressing Knowledge Equity and Epistemic Injustice in the Global South with Open Pedagogy Projects”

Conversations around open scholarship and public humanities, while revolving around engagements with the public, also need to factor in open pedagogic initiatives. The presenters of this study have worked with student communities to develop resources that can be used for communities outside the academia. This study would share our experiments in designing and developing these resources to facilitate discussions of similarities and differences between the Global North and the Global South in terms of attitudes towards pedagogy as well as the notions of openness. One of us speaks from the point of view of an NGO that is deeply invested in two things: getting students excited about conceptualising innovation beyond projects that are in a race to be awarded patent protection, and extending opportunities to academicians for research projects outside conceptions of academic research in terms of access and definitions of peer review “rigor”. The other is based in a private university in India and has developed a digital archive of literature of a low resource minority language in South Asia. It is hoped that, together, such experiments in pedagogic design expand the discourse of openness and attract further collaborations.