Abstracts
Engaging Open Social Scholarship
An Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership & Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) Online Event
December 8-10 2020 North America time / December 9-11 2020 Australasia time
#EngagingOSS
Click here to access a PDF version of the Book of Abstracts
Featured speakers
Brass, Kylie (Australian Academy of the Humanities), “Humanities in a Time of Crisis”
Australia’s season of bushfires in 2019-20 and the global COVID-19 pandemic, still unfolding, have had devastating ecological, economic, and social impacts. More than ever, the cultural, ethical, historical, communications and social expertise of the humanities will be vital to the effort to rebuild. This paper will reflect on the work of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and its wider national and international networks, to explore the role of the humanities in a research and policy agenda aimed at developing trusted solutions for resilience and recovery with lasting social traction.
Miller, Gabriel (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), “Supporting the Transition to Open Access: How to Move Forward, Together”
Increasingly, open scholarship principles are being embraced by funders, institutions, and researchers alike. But how to put principles into practice? This talk will focus on developing and undertaking strategies for moving forward together in order to support the worldwide transition to open access. It will focus on the current landscape in Canada and internationally, as well as barriers to change and potential models for moving forward.
Missingham, Roxanne (Australian National U Library), “Unleash the Beast – Time to Bring On Boudica – A Revolution Through Theses”
Our evolution to open access has been often based on cajoling, promising greater success and genteelly asking for copies that we wring our hands over in order to try to obtain a author accepted manuscript. Funders had done more to rip the veil off the chaste maidens of scholars trapped into commercial practices than any other. What would happen if we completely redesigned the system, put on our war paint and rose up against the modern Romans?
Revolutionising the system can take many paths. In this presentation the complete redesign of theses submission through a whole of student experience will be the focus. Implemented in 2019, it has flipped the traditional process of looking at repositories and processes. The digitisation of the complete cohort of theses has resulted in a massive increase in the impact and engagement of theses with the world. The presentation will focus on the impact on knowledge, systematic changes and the challenges of advocacy including a new Open access policy and procedures. And the actions of the modern Romans!
Niemann, Tanja (Érudit), “Changing the Game with Coalition Publica”
A pioneer since its founding in 1998, Érudit has supported several hundred scientific journals and publishers in the transition to digital publishing, and has been a strong proponent of open access. In order to better meet the needs of the Canadian scholarly community, Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project have teamed up to develop a collaborative initiative dedicated to the social sciences and humanities, Coalition Publica.
Lightning talks
Adamson, Chris (U South Dakota), “Faculty Development as Public Scholarship”
The pandemic has offered a new opportunity for institutional collaboration. Though everyone has Zoom fatigue, the emphasis on synchronous sessions further prompts faculty development professionals to hold workshops and training programs in partnership with other institutions. The Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of South Dakota launched a training sequence on public scholarship, partnering with facilitators from Emory and Baylor.
Following the “Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life” consortium, we adopted a broad view of public scholarship. Participants may associate public scholarship with the act of turning research into non-academic publications or creating websites and podcasts, but public scholarship also includes community partnerships and academic work that leads to public good. Our sequence introduced faculty to public scholarship as a dialogical partnership and offered workshops on facilitating public-facing student work and organizing flightless conferences, concluding with a panel featuring academics who promote the common good in different ways.
My objective for this lighting talk is to offer an example for colleagues to create a space for their own faculty and staff to work both with other institutions and their local communities. I will describe the development of the workshop sequence, discuss specific roadblocks and discoveries, and look forward to future iterations of the sequence. Recognizing that authentic public scholarship is in dialogue with rather than merely in service to the public out of a well-meaning but misplaced sense of obligation, future iterations will emphasize experiential learning and dialogical action research as we partner with local community members.
Appavoo, Clare (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), “Advancing CRKN’s Multi-pronged Strategy for Access to Knowledge”
CRKN’s approach to open scholarship includes a multi-pronged strategy to advance access to knowledge. This lightning talk will provide an update on the continuum of access supported by CRKN from licensed content to primary and secondary source research content in the Canadiana collections. Updated principles that underly CRKN’s licensing program will be presented. You will hear about CRKN’s new approach to stakeholder engagement in which members of the Canadian research community were invited to join our Stakeholder Alignment Group to show their support for CRKN’s bold negotiation objectives. You will hear an update on the ongoing development of the Canadiana collections, guided by newly developed principles for the scope of the collections and utilizing tactics to increase use and research impact.
Arbuckle, Alyssa (UVic), and Ray Siemens (UVic), “The Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons as an Open Social Scholarship Tool”
Open, collaborative, digital scholarship is gaining increasing prominence in Canada and internationally. In our online world, the possibility to co-create and share knowledge across departmental, institutional, and social boundaries is more attainable than ever. A key endeavour of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership is to collaboratively develop the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons. The Canadian HSS Commons is a national-scale digital research commons that will connect HSS researchers in order to accelerate research, development, community building, and engagement across the broad spectrum of specialists and active non-specialists in Canada. This talk will provide an update on the Canadian HSS Commons, with a focus on how this initiative can foster open social scholarship for humanities and social sciences practitioners.
Arthur, Paul (Edith Cowan U), and Lydia Hearn (Edith Cowan U), “Open Social Scholarship: How Different is it to Open Science?”
Despite major international advances toward open scholarship making shared study materials more widely accessible (Open Access), offering great opportunities for visibility, transparency and re-use of research outputs (Open Data) with the active engagement and collaboration of all relevant stakeholders (Open to Society), in practice, our fragmented academic and policy environment has limited our understanding of the meaning and opportunities required to incentivize open practices. In response, at the 40th session of UNESCO’s General Conference, a global consultation was launched with the goal of developing a “UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” due for release in 2021. Despite this positive move, as the title illustrates, emphasis continues to be focused primarily on ‘open science’ as opposed to the broader concept of ‘open research’.
Our presentation will seek to build on this agenda by raising dialogue around the need for a more far-reaching policy around open research as opposed to open science, that promotes openness of all forms of research, including the arts and humanities, or what could perhaps better be referred to as ‘open humanities’. We will reflect on the paradigms and methods underlying research in the humanities that focus more on subjectivity and perspectivity as opposed to the objectivity, validity, replicability, and generalisability of the sciences. Within this context, we will review the role that digital humanities could play by focusing their efforts more toward the future of open research in the humanities. Finally, we analyse how by working with galleries, libraries, archives and museums, advances in open research in the humanities can bring change to old traditions.
Barakat, Nora (Stanford U), and David Joseph Wrisley (New York U Abu Dhabi), “When Does it Become Open?”
Our presentation stems from a collaboration that came about in a part of the world with a muted, yet gently expanding, discussion of digital scholarship. It also emerged from co-founding a digital research group, OpenGulf, the mission of which is to foster interdisciplinary digital research that “publish open historical datasets, corpora and digital exhibits with the aim of opening Gulf Studies to digital historical exploration, analysis and interpretation in the service of open research and pedagogy.” (OpenGulf, 2020) The group’s mission admittedly includes a complex assortment of notions of openness. As we pass our second year of collaboration, we have realized how the notion of the open, like the fairness of data, is a kind of moving target, especially in the contemporary Arab world (Rojas-Castro, 2020).
Our presentation explores these dynamics through asking the question: “When does our work become truly open?”. One of the explicit goals of OpenGulf is to work to transform some of the ways that the colonial construction of knowledge production, especially differential digital access to research libraries and materials, has been institutionalized in the contemporary knowledge landscape of universities on the Arabian peninsula. In gathering resources on 19th century Gulf history, we have, for the most part, dealt with a rich selection of explicitly open licensed or public domain research material. Much of the ephemera and local resources of more recent eras, originating after the formation of nation states of the Gulf region in the late 20th century, however, have not been archived or digitized with digital reusability in mind (Wrisley, 2019).
Given the lack of national and regional legal frameworks for open licensing and creative commons and its overlap with knowledge infrastructures provided by US-based parent universities, we are most certainly in murky territory (Fiormonte et al., 2015). These contradictions lead us to argue that a pragmatism is required in pursuing openness, one that situates openness in our particular moment on the side of the social and the collaborative, focusing on building partnerships, training and human infrastructure. This pragmatism keeps openness trained on the goal of increasing access in step-wise and variegated forms, from the acquisition of digital materials to the skills required to manipulate and analyze them, all the way to the study of the history of information networks and their social and material manifestations, as ways of imagining new ways of becoming open (Russell, 2014).
Barnett, Tully (Flinders U), “Community Digitisation as Open Social Scholarship”
The work of open social scholarship, its labour, and its outputs are dependent on an infrastructure of technical and cultural networks, a significant one of which is digitization. However, digitization is a diverse set of practical and technical workflows set within broad agendas and an emotional landscape of both opportunity and fear, promises of innovation and access, and concerns about the erosion of control in multinational corporate environments. The close relationship between the concepts of open social scholarship (Arbuckle et al 2019; El Khatib et al 2020) and the practical and intellectual exercise of digitization of cultural objects and texts (Barnett 2019) is a space from which emerges a range of assumptions about the interactions between people and their cultural material in digital spaces. This has been explored through the relationships between large corporations and their mass digitisation projects and public and university libraries with their open access ethoses (Thystrup 2019; Barnett 2020 forthcoming). Small and bespoke digitisation projects have a different set of characteristics that underpin the infrastructural transactions of the place of digitization as a cultural activity in open social scholarship.
This paper considers the case study of a small digitization and transcribathon project at the South Australian Maritime Museum that used a model of collaboration between the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector, the university sector and the public on and offline to develop engagement between the public and the textual collections of the Museum. The paper considers the rhetorical around citizen historian and crowdsourcing models (Ridge 2014; 2020) and ‘slow digitisation’ (Prescott and Hughes 2018), the role of provenancing technical processes (Dahlstrom and Hansson 2019) and above all centring the relationships as the core of any digitization project (Lillie at al 2020).
Battersby, Lupin (Simon Fraser U), Alison Moore (Simon Fraser U), Valorie Crooks (Simon Fraser U), “Growing a Culture of Knowledge Mobilization at a Canadian University”
Knowledge mobilization (KM) is a key component of open social scholarship. We define KM as an intentional approach to increasing research impact through active collaboration, engagement, and communication with knowledge users and communities. At Simon Fraser University (SFU), there was an identified need to better support researchers with KM. In this presentation, we will share how we developed and launched SFU’s KM Hub to address this need. The KM Hub is embedded in the SFU Library in partnership with VP Research and International (VPRI). The KM Hub is strategically located at the Library as it is a cross-disciplinary setting accessed by and accessible to all faculties and researchers. The KM Hub team includes a digital scholarship librarian who manages the Hub, a faculty strategic lead who connects the Hub to VPRI, and a KM Officer who provides and organizes resources and activities of the unit. In addition, the Hub has an interdisciplinary advisory group representative of researchers across SFU that provide feedback and guidance as needed. The KM Hub’s goal is to grow the culture of KM, building on the strong foundations that exist at SFU, and become a leader in KM. In service of this goal, we have identified three areas of focus: (1) Support, including pre- and post-award consultations and navigation to resources; (2) Capacity building, including workshops, lectures, and tailored training for teams; and, (3) Recognition, featuring SFU KM activities as guest speakers and in a story series. We conclude the talk with key lessons learned.
Brown, Susan (U Guelph), and Kim Martin (U Guelph), “Linking Research(ers) In: Building Infrastructure for Open Scholarship”
This contribution will discuss how the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) seeks to make robust practices in open scholarship more feasible and attractive to scholars in the humanities. The time constraints and technical impediments with which most scholars typically work often means that it is easiest for them to engage with open scholarship initiatives in lightweight ways, for instance by uploading PDF files of published articles to institutional, association, or commercial repositories. The LINCS project seeks to foster the sharing of scholarship in more extensible, sustainable, and flexible ways by providing an infrastructure to support the production and use of Linked Open Data.
However, there are many challenges to doing so in ways that are accessible to as well as practical for the bulk of humanities scholars. This presentation will discuss how the infrastructure is being built based on an understanding of the range of users that demands a corresponding spectrum of tools and methodologies for the production of open scholarship through LINCS.
Crompton, Constance (U Ottawa), “Priorities in Open Scholarship: Build the Chain”
2020 has amply proven the value of open scholarship and demonstrated the way it lets policymakers, medical community members, the engaged public, and others act on evidence-backed knowledge with real agility. In the Priorities in Open Scholarship panel, this paper will consider one particular area of the human-centred sciences and the scholarly mechanisms that make HSS and GLAM contributions to health, safety and informed action taking possible.
This paper takes as its introductory case study an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic” (2007), which sheds light on the past efficacy of social-isolation and other anti-pandemic measures. This paper is not an analysis of the article’s content, but rather its production and reach. Certainly, the world pressure to make paywalled scholarship open during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic facilitated a rapid and agile global response to the pandemic. But which knowledge organizing and open scholarship practices made the article, and the action it encourages, possible?
This paper explores the open archival, historiographical, data, publication, and policy analysis practices that enable informed governance and public action. Each step in that chain of open material and practice is essential, but often the costs of archival material and digital data stewardship are forgotten, even as everyone globally benefits from the value they bring, in this case, to the development of life-saving public health best practice. This paper concludes with what, from a researcher perspective, we in HSS can mobilize our own disciplinary knowledge to contribute to open archival material and digital data stewardship to ensure the chain is unbroken.
El Khatib, Randa (UVic) and Ray Siemens (UVic), “Early Modern Digital Review: Peer Reviewing Digital Projects that Study the Early Modern World”
Building and using digital resources for early modern studies is becoming increasingly more common, although it is yet to be more formally acknowledged in the field through the systematic publication of reviews that demarcate academic trends, or within the university structure by counting toward tenure and promotion, despite the meticulous labour that digital projects require. This scarcity of formal reviews and evaluations of digital projects does not reflect the current scholarly landscape, which has prompted the launch of Early Modern Digital Review, a refereed journal dedicated entirely to reviewing digital resources that study the early modern world. This presentation will provide an overview of Early Modern Digital Review and will focus on the challenges inherent to reviewing digital projects.
El Khatib, Randa (UVic), William R. Bowen (U Toronto Scarborough), and Ray Siemens (UVic),“Platform Governance: Identifying and Implementing Shared Goals of Iter Gateway”
Digital scholarly publishing is an integral part of academia today. While the distinction between publishing models in the digital age has traditionally been categorized as ‘paywalled’ versus ‘open access,’ we now know that there are many kinds of open access publishing, some of which are more problematic than others, depending on the governance models of the platforms on which they sit, which are dictated by scholarly publishers. For example, many platforms act as gatekeepers to open scholarship, impose non-optional academic metrics to measure the impact that contributes to surveillance capitalism and control, and have high article processing charges (APC) that contribute to the further disparity in knowledge dissemination between countries and institutions.
This presentation will address the postdoctoral research that I plan to undertake with William R. Bowen and Ray Siemens that will take a closer look at the governance models of scholarly publishing platforms and will put them in conversation with Iter Press in order to 1) develop sustainable best practices for open and delayed open access publication across the full range of Iter Press publications, and 2) engage with the problems associated with measuring scholarly impact, and develop ethical practices for collecting, understanding, and responding to metrics and alt-metrics.
Estill, Laura (St. Francis Xavier U), “Don’t Just Show Your Sources, Share Them: Teaching Digital Primary Sources about Shakespeare”
This presentation argues that open pedagogy can be a key pillar to open social scholarship. Although there have been many definitions of open pedagogy, this paper proceeds with the definition that open pedagogy is predicated on the use of freely-available online resources that encourages students to undertake original research. Increasingly, humanities scholars are required to have an understanding of digital resources and tools—as such, it is imperative that we equip our students, at all levels, to engage critically with online texts and tools. This paper describes an assignment where students evaluate online resources about Shakespeare and share their findings, though the methodology could be adapted beyond a single author.
The “Evaluating Digital Shakespeare” assignment described in this chapter draws on traditional pedagogical practices, including Learning by Teaching, presentations, literary research methods, rhetorical analysis, and, when used as a midterm project, scaffolded assignments. By turning to online projects specifically and by having students create a shared repository of their assessments and interpretations of digital resources on the course website, this assignment leverages the benefits of open social scholarship and open education resources. The assignment described here helps the next generation of scholars learn how to evaluate digital resources and share their work in order to produce higher-quality assignments. Open social scholarship begins in our classrooms and our pedagogy.
Gatti, Rupert (Open Book Publishers; Trinity C), and Alessandra Tosi (Open Book Publishers; Cambridge U), “Open Scholarship: The Perspective of a Scholar-led Press”
Tosi will reflect on the 12 years of Open Book Publishers’ (OBP) activity, from its beginnings at the dawn of open access for Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) monographs, to the current flourishing of initiatives, through the lenses of an independent and scholar-led Press. Tosi will describe the trajectory from the provision of free to read PDFs uploaded on the publisher’s website to the proliferation of platforms for open access dissemination within and outside the global north. In parallel to this, OPB has seen a shift from PDF editions as exact replicas of the printed work to a wealth of digital formats and the emergence of richer interactions between digital material and the written text. Innovation and expansion in open access provision have translated into a less insular approach to publishing, which is no longer limited to single-authored monographs and edited volumes, but increasingly revolves around diverse collaborative modes such as a new kind of joint series, partnerships and institutional collaborations.
Goddard, Lisa (UVic), “Persistent Identifiers for FAIR Open Social Scholarship”
Scholarship is an ongoing conversation that builds on previous arguments, findings, and publications. Without access to that long citation chain, the theoretical foundations of modern scholarship begin to crumble. Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are critical elements of research infrastructure, helping to ensure that research is, and continues to be, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). In this session, we’ll review established (ORICD, DOI) and emerging (ROR, RAID) PIDs to show how they work together to create a stable and richly interlinked research environment for both human users and automata.
Harris, Katherine D.(San Jose State U), Rebecca Frost Davis (St. Edward’s U), and Matthew K. Gold (City U New York), “Making Digital Pedagogy Count with Open Scholarship”
Digital Pedagogy — the scholarly conversation about teaching engaged with digital tools, platforms, and methods — thrives through open social scholarship. In response to this vibrant but ephemeral conversation across Twitter, blogs, and other open social media, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities came together as a project “to amplify the digital pedagogy conversation . . . and to establish a scholarly infrastructure for organizing, preserving, sharing, and giving authority to digital pedagogy materials” (Davis, Gold & Harris). Across fifty-nine keywords, the collection provides 573 unique artifacts as examples of digital pedagogy that can also be reused. Such open digital sharing highlights the needs for openly licensing shared materials and acknowledging borrowed material as the #citepedagogy hashtag advocates.
Analysis of these artifacts reveals openness—“transparency of practice, removal of boundaries, and sharing of content, tools, and ideas” (Davis, Gold & Harris)—as a key concept in digital pedagogy. Openness was also a key factor in the creation of the project from open editing through a public Github site, to open peer review and open access publication via the project’s publisher, the MLA, to the ultimate “publication,”—an “act of making public the time, effort, labor, and scholarship of hundreds of humanities instructors related to teaching and learning.” (Davis, Gold & Harris)
This short presentation, by three editors of the project, will discuss the role of open scholarship in the creation of a wide-scale, pedagogically focused publication and posit ways that others can continue and extend a conversation about Digital Pedagogy that has only become increasingly vital as universities hold their classes online during the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Johnson, Ian (U Sydney), “Overcoming Knowledge Friction in Digital Humanities Applications: Can We Defeat the Square Wheel?”
If you are starting a project and know you need a digital component, how do you find out what’s available (technology), what choices to make (experience), and which workflows to adopt (proven practice)? If you’re lucky, you know the right person. Otherwise, it’s a big bad world out there. . . .
I believe we miss out on a great deal of potential and generate enormous extra costs, and square wheels, through “knowledge friction”. In part, this comes from under-reporting of methodology, workflows, (and also people), often relegated to a footnote or acknowledgement in published articles and web sites or reported in conferences and journals too specialized for those who most need the information.
Various approaches have been adopted. Technological resource lists typically fail to provide adequate contextual knowledge. Guides to best practice provide good contextualisation but may fail to provide specific solutions. A “recipe” approach may come closer to a practical solution but risks narrowness of application and costly creation and update. Lists and blogs provide patchy, ephemeral information–if you’re not there at the right time, you miss it. As more and more digital humanities centres, teaching programs, and other programs create partial solutions through overlapping resources, knowledge friction may be increased, rather than reduced, due to information overload. Meanwhile, language bubbles may also create barriers.
In this presentation, I hope to provoke a discussion of ways in which we might start to build an open knowledge ecosystem, perhaps as an information clearinghouse, within the commons, as an encyclopedia, or simply a database of people-who-know-about-things. I’ve had this conversation many times, and people are momentarily enthusiastic. Perhaps it is time for action.
Kim, Hoyeol (Texas A&M U), “Pursuing Computational Humanities Research as a Graduate Student in the Humanities”
In the digital humanities, there is an emphasis on the importance of collaboration since the digital humanities field requires both ‘D’ (digital) and ‘H’ (humanities) skills. Collaboration is the “lynchpin” which supports “productivity, learning, experimenting, and knowledge acquisition” (Harris 8). For humanities scholars, who are used to working alone, working collaboratively provides unique challenges. It is difficult for graduate students to pursue collaboration with different disciplines and institutions in the digital humanities due to the different structures of their assistantships as well as institutional structures. However, in the humanities, it is challenging to create digital projects without collaborating. These environmental difficulties can be overcome by working with practitioners, professionals, and scholars, communicating with a variety of experts in the communities, and getting technical and funding support from DH centers. In this lightning talk, I will narrate the main strategies I use while writing my PhD dissertation—of which the focus is on machine learning colorization and sentiment analysis—to pursue computational literary studies through collaboration: 1) Making use of DH centers and DH librarians 2) Getting feedback from DH and other communities 3) Having a committee member from engineering or computer science.
Kingsley, Danny (Australian National U) “A Call to Develop Standards for Those Delivering ‘Research Practice’ Training”
The nature of the research endeavour is changing rapidly and requires a wide set of skills beyond the research focus. The delivery of aspects of researcher training ‘beyond the bench’ is met by different sections of an institution, including the research office, the media office and the library. In Australia, researcher training in open access, research data management, and other aspects of open science is primarily offered by librarians. But what training do librarians receive in scholarly communication within their librarianship degrees?
For a degree to be offered in librarianship and information science, it must be accredited by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), with a curriculum that is based on ALIA’s lists of skills and attributes. However, these lists do not contain any reference to key open research terms and are almost mutually exclusive with core competencies in scholarly communication, as identified by the North American Serials Interest Group and an international Joint Task Force.
Over the past decade, teaching by academics in universities has been professionalised with courses and qualifications. Those responsible for researcher training within universities and the material that is being offered should also meet an agreed accreditation. This talk argues that there is a clear need to develop parallel standards around ‘research practice’ and training for PhD students and Early Career Researchers, and those delivering this training should be able to demonstrate their skills against these standards.
Models to begin developing accreditation standards are starting to emerge, with the recent launch of the Centre for Academic Research Quality and Improvement in the UK. There are several organisations, both grassroots and long-established, in Australia that would be able to contribute to this project, including AOASG, ANZORN, AIMOS, CAUL, ARDC and CAPOS. The time to act is now.
Lawrence, Amanda (RMIT U), “Bibliodiversity and the Evidence Ecosystem: Looking Beyond the Formal Publishing System”
Recently various scholars and research groups have raised the issue of diversity in the scholarly communication system, questioning the merits of what appears to be a monoculture dominated by academic journals as the main format, and controlled by commercial academic publishers who increasingly control infrastructures of scholarly communication (Jussieu 2017; Shearer et al. 2020). While this is a serious problem in academic publishing, the broader research publishing ecosystem is actually far more diverse than is generally recognised, involving multiple sectors and organisations publishing a range of genres, particularly to inform and influence public policy and practice. Think tanks, charities, government agencies, and research centres are regularly publishing reports, discussion papers, briefings and evaluations, datasets and visualisations and much more online using a variety of websites, databases and platforms to publish and disseminate their work. While this provides great flexibility and variety, it also presents problems, not around centralisation, privatisation, and control but dispersal, discoverability, credibility and neglect.
Seen together, this suggests we need to take a broader view of research publishing to recognise that forces are pulling in multiple directions. This perspective might provide new ways of thinking about formal and informal publishing practices as part of a complex adaptive system that includes but goes beyond academia, potentially opening up new approaches for reforming and redesigning the research communication system to address the challenges and maximise the benefits for all. This talk is basically to advocate for an expanded view of research publishing that goes beyond academia to take a multicentric, multisector approach, particularly in the context of public policy and practice.
Martin, Shawn (Dartmouth C), “Political Economy and Diplomatics of Open Social Scholarship”
Political economy can be defined as a problem of how societies choose certain solutions over others (Drazen, 2000). In discussing the political economy of information, Steven Marks (2016) argues that efficient capitalist economies require an “information nexus” where certain information, including scientific knowledge, is freely available. Such an argument would seem to favor an open form of social scholarship, but contemporary realities of academic knowledge sharing seem to work quite differently. Why is this, and how can it change? Andrew Abbott (2005) and Rom Harré (2014) suggested that universities and professional societies in the United States formed what they called “hinge” that made research outputs (books and articles) a means for professional organizations to validate accreditation.
Scholarly communication was, therefore, never seen as the kind of political economy described by Marks. A change in that philosophical framework could, however, help address this disconnect, and a subfield of information science called diplomatics may provide an answer. Maurizio Ferraris (2013), Bruno Delmas (1996) and Fiorella Foscarini (2012) identified the importance of documentation practices in the transmission of knowledge, specifically the concept of “organic information” in which authority rests in ever-changing societal contexts. Thus, according to diplomatic theory, an alternative political economy of open social scholarship would rest not on contemporary accreditation needs of professional academics but on changing and socially constructed societal needs. Perhaps such a reframing could help to move what is now a relatively closed system toward a more efficient and open political economy of open social scholarship.
Maxwell, John W. (Simon Fraser U), and Ellen Michelle (U Toronto), “Are We Really Open, Social, Scholarly? Some Preliminary Findings”
The first part of a larger investigation into how we might write and cite better with open social scholarship in mind, this brief talk presents some basic numbers and citation analysis from the INKE community. Working from the Proceedings of the first 8 years of INKE gatherings (12 journal special issues from SRC, KULA, and Pop!) the beginnings of a picture of how this scholarly community writes and cites begins to emerge. We also offer here an open data set for further collaborative study of this corpus.
Meneses, Luis (UVic), Ray Siemens (UVic), and William R. Bowen (U Toronto Scarborough), “Digital Online Projects: What are the Positive Aspects of Collaboration?”
Online digital projects are used by researchers to explore their research questions and to expose their research to a larger audience [1]. Software products and online digital projects provide mutual benefits and collaboration roles for the ‘content-area academic expert’ and the ‘methods-area academic expert’—each representing academic domain areas of expertise that come together for a common goal [2]. Each is significant academic work, and ideally, they should be valued in the same way across professional academic systems.
The content-area academic expert focuses on the benefits to the domain of the content area (for example, a greater understanding of certain aspects of Renaissance drama), working to articulate the goals associated with its contribution to the discipline and the value of sharing and focusing the community on a specific resource. On the other hand, the methods expert focuses on facilitating a framework to accelerate the research, ensuring an appropriate information-science approach, and communicating responses–while matching the content-area academic expertise with their own.
In this presentation, I propose to outline the positive aspects of collaboration in online digital projects. This presentation will highlight these positive aspects within the context of Iter Community: a not-for-profit partnership dedicated to facilitating and supporting communication, collaboration, and digital project creation for research communities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This presentation will further describe the foundations for effective collaboration between the academic and the methods expert so that working together magnifies their contributions and streamlines the development of online digital projects in the short term.
Moon, Jeff (Canadian Association of Research Libraries Portage Network), “Canada’s Portage Network – The Foundational Role of Community Engagement in the Evolution of Research Data Management in Canada”
Research Data Management (RDM) is entering an exciting new era in Canada with the creation of a New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO). This session will describe Portage, a national Research Data Management (RDM) initiative of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and how Portage is merging into NDRIO. Participants will learn more about strategic directions for RDM under NDRIO and the synergies that this merger promises to foster with partners in Advanced Research Computing (ARC) and Research Software (RS). Specifically, we will look at strategic growth in national support for research data management, which is closely aligned with a national Network of Experts and a growing community of practice. We’ll introduce major infrastructure and services, associated training, and how community engagement and mobilization have been foundational in this process.
Nelson, Brent (University of Saskatchewan), Kyle Dase (University of Saskatchewan), and Greg Kneidel (University of Connecticut), “The Social Network of Early Modern Literary Miscellanies”
In recent years we have considered the social text from the perspective of the texts themselves—as the product, in the first instance, of a social network or at least a social environment—and also from the perspective of editorial process—involving a crowd, or at least a group, in a collaborative process of editing a text with the support of connective digital platforms. In this presentation, the contributing authors want to pose a third domain of sociability and social space, the literary miscellany. From this perspective, the items in such a document (typically in manuscript) are sociable, operating in the context of other texts adjacent to, and often in conversation with each other. If we treat the manuscript miscellany as a social context, what might be gained from using social networking tools to study, for example, the works of John Donne and their afterlives in manuscript miscellanies, and what sort of reading environment might we need to support such an approach to reading?
Rockwell, Geoffrey (U Alberta), Andrew MacDonald (McGill U), and Kaylin Land (McGill U), “Social Analytics Through Spyral”
Research in the humanities tends to be thought of as a solitary pursuit. We recognize that humanists might work together on tools like dictionaries or concordances, but our inherited image of the thinking that is research is that of the Cartesian philosopher alone in a cabin purging themselves of error. Rembrandt captured this in the Philosopher in Meditation. By contrast, in fields like digital humanities, we often think together in distributed teams. This paper is about a tool, Spyral, that is designed to support open distributed thinking through analytics.
Spyral (voyant-tools.org/spyral) is a notebook programming environment built on Voyant and extending Voyant. It is in a tradition of “literate programming” where the development environment supports the intertwining of text discussion and code so that development starts with describing what is being done for others. Wolfram Mathematica (www.wolfram.com/mathematica/) and now Jupyter notebooks (jupyter.org) are the best-known examples of such literate notebook environments, and they are both used widely for data science and scientific computing because they encourage the writing out of the thinking behind analysis. This model has, in turn, become popular in digital humanities text mining for the same reason. A notebook can explain the thinking while weaving in code and the results, including visualizations. Spyral builds on this paradigm in two ways:
- First, Spyral is an extension of Voyant in that one can launch a Spyral notebook from any panel with interesting results in Voyant and can embed interactive Voyant panels in any notebook. This means that one can document and share a research project carried out in Voyant with all the thinking-through, code, and results in place. As such, Spyral implements an emerging way that analytics are shared in the DH and data science community.
- Second, Spyral notebooks run on and are stored on the Voyant server for public access by default. They are thus imagined as social from the beginning. Different users can work in alternation on the same notebook. Any notebook can be “forked” by a different user to create variants or to adapt ideas to their own research. In short, Spyral extends Voyant to make text analysis and visualization social.
In this presentation, we briefly introduce the literate programming notebook paradigm and then demonstrate Spyral while discussing how it implements ideas of social scholarship. We will conclude by discussing next steps for Spyral so that it can be used by groups in public on data walls.
Saklofske, Jon (Acadia U), “A Tale of Two Minecrafts: Using Digital Game Experiences to Understand the Value(s) of Open Social Scholarship and to Inspire Alternative Academic Practices”
My daughter and I collaborate in the worlds of Minecraft, a unique kind of digital game experience that involves self-directed and open-ended discovery and creation. While playing, I’ve noticed that the game’s mining and crafting activities curiously resemble the kinds of work involved in research and scholarship, as players (in both solo and collaborative modes of play) gather resources and recombine these into new and shared architectures, styles, experiments, and systems. However, there are two main editions of Minecraft: the original “Java Edition,” which allows players to extend their crafting work outside of the game world by creating and sharing new mods, maps, and assets for the game (many of which are free), and the more recent “Bedrock Edition,” a less open version in which official add-on packs (the only way to extend one’s experience) are managed and sold by Microsoft. These two Minecrafts operate concurrently but are not interoperable, and their communities are motivated and directed by very different sets of values.
This paper will use the example of two Minecrafts as a way to understand and clarify the key advantages and opportunities of open, social models of research and scholarly work. This will lead to a proposal for an alternative form of academic publishing practice, open access scholarship, knowledge dissemination, and social knowledge creation that models itself after the combined examples of Minecraft’s Java edition community, the collaborative communities of Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/), and the socially-aligned forking and branching repository management practices enabled by GitHub (https://github.com/).
Shuttleworth, Kate (Simon Fraser U) and Kevin Stranack (Public Knowledge Project), “Not a University Press: Publishing the Weird, Wonderful, and One of a Kind Books in Academic Libraries”
Open access publishing is a common service provided by academic libraries, with much of the effort placed on hosting and supporting journals. Some libraries, however, have expanded their service to include open access books. Unlike university presses, library monograph publishing is not constrained by the need to develop a distinct subject specialty, produce print copies, nor to publish books that will generate a minimum market interest. Without such limitations, library publishers have the opportunity to publish scholarship that may exist within emerging or niche fields of study or in the margins between disciplines, can showcase approaches and perspectives that might otherwise be lost in the gap between self-publishing and university press publishing, and can provide opportunities to partner with communities beyond the traditional walls of academic publishing, including students, professionals, and community groups.
At the SFU Library, we use the free, open source Open Monograph Press (OMP) software to undertake four kinds of publishing projects: 1) an established disciplinary press (SFU Archaeology Press), 2) faculty publications, 3) graduate student publications, and 4) student course-based publications. These projects result in published scholarship that is open, online, discoverable by scholars around the world, and professionally presented in accessible formats such as EPUB, HTML, and PDF. Publishing in OMP also gives authors the flexibility to present their work in non-traditional scholarly formats, such as through multimedia. By partnering with scholars and practitioners within and beyond our institution, the library publishing division has the opportunity to challenge notions of which ideas and voices are considered to have “authority,” and to give voice to work representing different perspectives and ways of knowing from around the globe.
Leveraging broader library expertise in faculty and student relationships and outreach, copyright, cataloging and indexing, and systems administration allows for a more complete service model. Despite these strengths, however, challenges continue to exist, including the need for greater marketing, copyediting and layout, graphic design, and, perhaps most importantly, knowing when to say “no”. In this session, we will share our experiences in trying to make SFU scholarship more open, inclusive, and participatory, and invite others to join us in collaboratively improving this publishing activity.
Siemens, Lynne (UVic), “University – Industry Partnerships: Looking Ahead to Success”
As argued elsewhere (Siemens and INKE Research Group 2019c, 2019a), university industry partnerships are rare in the Humanities, especially when compared to the Sciences. Because Humanities researchers and partners may not be as familiar with ways to work together, there are few frameworks available to structure these collaborations to ensure their success. This raises questions about the ways that these kinds of teams can proactively coordinate their activities to be effective. Using Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) as a case study, a Humanities-based university–industry partnership studying open social scholarship, this paper examines potential frameworks to achieve this goal.
Building from earlier research (Siemens and INKE Research Group 2015, 2019b, 2019c, 2019a), framework components include regular communication through a variety of channels and integration of industry partners into research activities. The researchers and industry partners also need to ensure that they have a clear understanding of each other’s reasons for participating in the collaboration, desired outcomes, and measures of success in order to leverage these to ensure that each party meets their goals. Further, potential challenges should be recognized to ensure that they can be mitigated.
Having now received grant funding, INKE has taken steps to enact these activities and create a framework that provides a foundation for successful research collaboration. Additional research over the life of the grant will explore the effectiveness of this framework.
Sinatra, Michael (U Montréal) and Marcello Vitali-Rosati (U Montréal), “Exploring the Use of ‘Parcours numériques’ for Scholarly Editions”
Launched in 2014, the series ‘Parcours numériques’ (http://parcoursnumeriques-pum.ca) was an attempt to offer an alternative publishing model that combined print and electronic publishing as well as promoting open access while still maintaining a range of funding revenues to be economically sustainable. The idea was to think of new ways to have two different yet complementary versions of the same book. The print version (also available in a homothetic version in PDF or ePub) would be a linear, short essay, with minimal or ideally no scholarly apparatus (notes, images, etc.) present. The electronic version would contain the original text with not only “standard” supplementary materials one would have expected in the print version, but everything that was unique to a web-based environment, namely the opportunity to include videos, audio commentaries, links to external sites, etc. With eleven books now published, it is fair to say that my co-series editor and I have successfully demonstrated to our readers and the press the value of such a series.
In my talk, I will discuss the ways I am now exporting this publishing model to scholarly editions, based not only on my experience with the series but also my own textual editorial experience that preceded it, starting with my role as general editor of The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (Pickering & Chatto, 2003). I will suggest the ways scholarly editions can continue to exist in print with new electronic features built not only in an online version but also into the print version, along the lines of recent interventions by McGann and Mandell, as well as Rockwell and Sinclair in their theoretical investigation of textual analysis.
Smith, Rosalind (Australian National U), “New Bibliographical Tools: The Index in the Digital Age”
This paper discusses the creation of an open access digital index to early modern women’s complaint poetry that is part of a collaboration between digital designers and early modern specialists in the ARC-funded project Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint. In a circumscribed form of distant reading, the index is designed to allow the scale and richness of a dataset to be represented and offer multiple pathways into its constituent paths, supporting exploration and enriching interpretation by highlighting relationships and structures. The index also makes transparent the codes and conventions through which the database has been constructed, with the aim of furthering the critical conversations made explicit in the project’s other, traditional publications of essays, book chapters, and a monograph. Organised as a “generous interface” rather than alphabetically, the reinvented first-line index discussed here denaturalises and re-conceives one of the foundational tools of bibliography—the index—for the digital age.
Starry, Rachel (U California, Riverside) and Krystal Boehlert (U California, Riverside), “Building Virtual Community through Digital Scholarship Meetups”
Within the context of launching a Digital Scholarship (DS) program at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) Library, we will share how we created and facilitated a Digital Scholarship Meetup series as a social and collaborative virtual space for community building, which can be particularly challenging in the current remote environment. Our goals for the weekly DS Meetups over the summer of 2020 were to create an online community for connection and collaboration and create a space where folks interested in digital scholarship could ask questions, meet potential collaborators, and build and share knowledge.
In this lightning talk, we will discuss our techniques for facilitating inclusive and interactive virtual online community meetings, such as inviting community members to contribute in various formats—through a collaborative notes document, a spreadsheet of open tools, and in-progress project show-and-tell—as well as modeling a casual tone through informal introductions, posing ice-breaker questions, and opening the Zoom meeting room early for low-stakes conversation. The DS Meetups are primarily advertised to our local UCR community, yet we welcome all who wish to participate, which has resulted in our community comprising individuals from around the globe. While highlighting many digital humanities-related resources, these meetups are not limited to the humanities, since we intentionally seek to foster interdisciplinary relationships across campus. The series also bakes in open-source digital scholarship software demonstrations to build awareness of the benefits and possibilities of open and public scholarship.
Tiedje, Michelle (Independent), “An Opening for Reconciliation?: Bringing History Home in the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project”
The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project currently exists as an open-access digital archive and was just launched publicly in October of 2020. Its creators, contributors, partners, and stakeholders hope it will eventually blossom into a movement for transformational change—that by making U.S. federal government records related to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School more accessible to the families of children who attended the school and by raising awareness about the full history and legacy of U.S. Indian boarding schools—the project can help spark a national acknowledgement of this truth and the need for reconciliation. But what does it take for a digital archive to become a reconciliation project? And how can a digital project make itself not only open and accessible to the public but truly inclusive as well?
The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project’s intense first two years of work offer many experiences, lessons, and insights that point to both challenges and opportunities toward achieving these ambitious goals. In this lightning talk, the project’s manager under its foundational first grant (2018-2020) will spotlight the birth of the project’s primary goals, unanticipated challenges the project encountered within its first two years that propelled the project in new directions, and several specific ways these challenges offer opportunities for the project’s future growth as it moves into a new phase of action. It is also hoped that, by offering this concise and succinct summary of major lessons learned, this lightning talk will empower participants in projects with similar aims to ask key questions of both themselves and the funders upon which they depend early and often.
Tindall, Alexis (U Adelaide), “Keep the Plates Spinning: Furthering Digital Innovation at the University of Adelaide One Step at a Time”
In the face of contemporary challenges including digital preservation, research data management responsibilities, and the open access agenda, the University of Adelaide Library— with an interest in supporting digital humanities—invested in a Manager, Digital Innovation, in 2020. Landing in a pandemic-affected, resource-stressed higher education environment, with big stakeholder expectations, that person had to be creative in how to advance our ambitions, recognise the limitations of a strained community, and juggle diverse stakeholder priorities. This project has just begun, but in this short talk, Alexis will talk about their efforts so far at building a pop-up DH Lab program, capitalising on relationships, and identifying opportunities when our intentions risk overstretching our capacity.
Turin, Mark (U British Columbia), “The World Oral Literature Series: Innovations in Ethical and Multimedia Open Humanities Publishing”
The World Oral Literature series was designed to preserve and promote the oral literatures of Indigenous people by publishing materials on endangered traditions in innovative, responsive, ethical and culturally-appropriate ways. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, linguistics and information studies, the study of oral genres is an exciting and fast-developing field, but one with few publishing outlets. The series editor and publishers work with researchers to locate opportunities and principled strategies for including recordings of the oral literatures contained in their monographs and edited collections, thus helping to preserve the richness and contextual meaning of oral narratives in ways that invite critical engagement with questions of representation and reuse.
Wake Hyde, Zoe (Rebus Foundation), “How Can an Open Research Workflow Tool Help to Foster Open Social Practices?”
Rebus Ink is an open source research workflow tool designed to support humanities and social science researchers to better manage and draw insights from their collections of sources. This talk explores the ways in which it can support the further adoption of open research practices and non-traditional scholarly outputs.
Rebus Ink is being developed with a fully open approach, connecting with other open platforms in the ecosystem, prioritising content import from open publishers, publishing user research openly and committing to transparency in our processes. Further, we are invested in identifying ways in which we can support researchers who seek to work more openly. As we develop collaborative features, we are excited to see how we can engage the scholarly community to create ways of sharing work at all stages of the research process, creating transparency and multiple ways to engage with research as it happens. This work is inspired by the progress in sharing research processes in open science, but we seek to tailor it specifically to those working in humanities and social sciences disciplines, with all the unique opportunities, benefits and challenges that come along with them.
By remaining deeply connected to the users and communities we serve and focusing on a somewhat neglected phase of the publishing cycle (connecting consumption of published materials back to creation), we believe Rebus Ink can become a key piece of infrastructure in a transformative, open scholarly publishing ecosystem.
Warman, Caroline (Oxford U), “More Autonomy and More Collaboration: The Perspective of a Humanities Scholar”
In this talk, I identify how the open platform and responsive formats offered by the Open Book Publishers have helped humanities scholarship climb out of the ivory tower, collaborate more, disseminate better, and reach further. I draw on my experience of working on three diverse book-length projects, which include rich multimedia content.
Wilson, Lee (Canadian Association of Research Libraries Portage Network), “Canada’s Federated Research Data Repository – From Prototype to Production”
This session will provide an overview of the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR)—a national platform for digital research data management and federated discovery of Canadian research data, developed through a partnership between the Compute Canada Federation and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ Portage Network. Currently in limited production, the FRDR repository service aims to be in full production early in 2021. The discovery service, which exposes metadata from a growing array of Canadian data repositories, is already fully functional. This session will describe the genesis of FRDR, its major features and value proposition, the role of FRDR within Canada’s changing digital infrastructure landscape, and how Portage has collaborated with Compute Canada Federation to move this core dual-purpose platform from prototype to production.
Winter, Caroline (UVic), Randa El Khatib (UVic), Alyssa Arbuckle (UVic), and Ray Siemens (UVic), “Reimagining the Open Knowledge Practicum for a Virtual Environment”
The Electronic Textual Culture Lab’s (ETCL’s) Open Knowledge Program is a suite of initiatives that put open knowledge into action. One of the initiatives is the Open Knowledge Program (OKP), which invites members of the University of Victoria community and the wider community into the lab to pursue research projects with open knowledge components.
When the lab and the rest of UVic’s campus closed in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the OKP was put on hold out of the recognition that many of us—including our OKP fellows—were adjusting to new ways of working and new arrangements at home. As campus is reopening and many of us are settling into our new routines, we now face the challenge of reimagining the OKP—a program rooted in the experience of working together in a shared physical space—for a virtual environment.
In this presentation, we share our experiences reimagining an in-person, highly collaborative open research program for a virtual environment, including how to effectively support researchers, provide project management consultation, and build community in an online space.