Re-Defining Open Social Scholarship in an Age of Generative ‘Intelligence’

4-5 June 2026
Montréal, Québec
U Montréal, aligned with the annual gathering of CSDH/SCHN
Room B-4215. Pavillon Jean-Brillant, 3200 Jean-Brillant Street [Map Link]
INKE 2026 Gathering
Submissions via this link (due 1 February 2026)

Note: Unless otherwise listed, anticipated recorded presentations for independent viewing will be listed following the in-person session details in the tentative program.

n.b. this program is current as of 7 May 2026 and is subject to change

Thursday, 4 June

8:30am – 8:55am: Registration (via CSDH)

8:55am – 9:00am: Welcome, Ray Siemens (U Victoria)

9:00am – 10:00am: Keynote: Matt Huculak (KULA Academy, U Victoria), “Library Futures, Responsible AI and Trusted Collections”
Chair: Clare Appavoo (CRKN)

10:00am – 10:30am: Break

10:30am – Noon: Plenary Panel: AI and LLMs in Knowledge Context/s (~5–10 min opening statements, then discussion)
Chair: Ray Siemens, U Victoria

• Hannah Paveck, Karine Morin (CFHSS), “Inflection Point: Shaping the Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences”
• Yves Terrat (Érudit / Coalition Publica), “Innovating with Care: Developing Ethical Guidelines for AI at Érudit”
• John Maxwell (CISP / Simon Fraser U), “Distinguishing Between Hype and Reality: Can We Please Stop Saying ‘AI’”
• William Bowen (Iter / U Toronto), “Questions, Not Answers, from an Academic Publisher”
• James MacGregor (CRKN / HSS DRI), “Open as Possible, Closed as Necessary – Or the Reverse? Risks and Promises of GenAI in Humanities and Social Sciences Digital Research Infrastructure”
• Faraz Forghan Parast (U Victoria; reflecting the work also of Brittany Amell, Alan Colín-Arce, Graham Jensen, Tim Sobie, Thomas Sherriff, Ray Siemens, and the INKE Partnership), “Open, Social, Synthetic: Mapping the New Conditions of Scholarship”

Noon – 1:00pm: Lunch (The second floor cafeteria is recommended, given timing)

1:00pm – 2:30pm: Presentations

1:00pm – 2:00pm: Longer Lightning Talks (=< 10 mins)
Chair: Jon Bath (U Saskatchewan)

• Hart Cohen (Western Sydney U), “The Artist and the Algorithm”
• Zack Batist (McGill U), “Where Do We Draw the Line? On Legitimate Uses of AI and Open Information Commons, and Commitment to Community Values”
• Kyle Dase (U Victoria), “Peering into AI’s Black Box through the Act of Translation”
• Alan Colín-Arce, Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “Multilingualism and Community Governance: Infrastructural Imperatives on the HSS Commons”
• Bernardo Bueno (PUCRS), “Translating Open Scholarship: Lessons from Canada–Brazil Collaboration for a Multilingual Humanities and Social Sciences Commons”

2:00pm – 2:30pm: Shorter Lightning Talks (=<5 mins)
Chair: Lynne Siemens (U Victoria)

• Leonardo Colato, Franco Guglielmoni (PUCRS Digital Humanities Lab), “Open Scholarship and the Integration of a Brazilian DH Lab to the HSS Commons”
• Luis Meneses, Ryan Boothby-Young, Brandon Stanton, and Richard J. Lane (Vancouver Island U), “Reflections on Innovation, Maintenance, and Preservation of the Digital Scholarly Infrastructure in the Humanities”
• Alexia Schneider (U Montréal), “An Imperfect AI to Uphold Human Agency: Vindicating the ‘Yes But’ of this World”
• John Bessai (Independent), “The Canadian Aporietic Condition as Open Scholarship Theory: Public Code, Generative AI, and the Governance of the Knowledge Commons”
• Ian McCrabb (Systemik Solutions), [Independent Viewing via https://doi.org/10.25547/RV74-G472] “AI Integration – Humanities Researcher Workbenches”

2:30pm – 3:30pm: Presentations

2:30pm – 3:00pm: Shorter Lightning Talks (=<5 mins)
Chair: Constance Crompton (U Ottawa)

• Aaron Mauro and Abubakar Bunamay (Brock U), “Memory is All You Need: Developing RISK for Local Security and Minimal Data Leaks”
• Dellannia Segreti (U Toronto), Teresa Lobalsamo (U Toronto Mississauga), “Digital Mapping Project: Human and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration”
• Laura Baumvol (U British Columbia), Alan Colín-Arce (U Victoria), “Beyond Access: Linguistic Justice and Multilingual Publishing in Latin American Digital Humanities”
• Laura Estill (St Francis Xavier U), “Shakespeare, the Digital Humanities, and Loss”
• Brittany Amell, Lynne Siemens, Tanja Niemann, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, Caroline Winter, Talya Jesperson, JT Kern, Maggie Sardino, Sarah Milligan, Kim Silk, and the INKE Partnership (U Victoria, Érudit, CRKN), [Independent Viewing] “OSPO Collected Volumes: Consolidating Policy Observation for (Almost) a Decade” (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Collections)

3:00pm – 3:30pm: Shorter Lightning Talks (=<5 mins)
Chair: Alyssa Arbuckle (CRKN/Érudit)

• Rebecca Dowson, Joey Takeda (Simon Fraser U), “How Do You (Continue to) Implement a New Knowledge Environment? Re-aligning and Sustaining Digital Scholarship”
• Nicole White, Julie Jones, Alison J. Moore (Simon Fraser U), “Being Open and Social: Fostering a Research Culture through an Open Scholarship Journal Club”
• Samantha MacFarlane (U Victoria), “Not Gatekeeping but Caretaking: Editorial Work as Social Scholarship”
• Julie Jones (Simon Fraser U), “Creating Connection and Building Community with Methods in Dialogue”

3:30pm – 4:00pm: Break

4:00pm – 5:00pm: Keynote: Tully Barnett (Adelaide U), “Algorithmic Reading and the Politics of Cultural Infrastructure”
Chair: Faraz Forghan Parast (U Victoria)

5:00pm – 7:00pm: Reception, shared with CSDH/SCHN (Details TBA)

Friday, 5 June

8:30am – 10:00am

8:30am – 9:00am: Shorter Lightning Talks (=<5 mins)
Chair: Tanja Niemann (Érudit)

• Simon van Bellen (Érudit), “Do Scholarly Article Views Reflect a “Social Impact” of SSH Research? Analyzing Users and Usage Patterns of Érudit’s Collections”
• Alison J. Moore, Sophie E. Ashton, Lupin Battersby (Simon Fraser U), “Moving Away from Metrics and Toward Connection: Knowledge Mobilization in CVs Scoping Review Findings ”
• Constance Crompton (U Ottawa), “More is More: Reshaping DH Training Workshops to Meet Constituent Needs”
• Lynne Siemens (U Victoria), “‘Shared load and labour’: Ongoing Collaboration in an Open Social Scholarship Project”
• Maya Dodd (Flame U), [Independent Viewing via https://doi.org/10.25547/KTFS-XF77] “Narrating Data: With AI, Does the Narrative Outlast the Archive?”

9:00am – 10:00am: Longer Lightning Talks (=<10 mins)
Chair: Laura Estill (St Francis Xavier U)

• Jon Saklofske (Acadia U), “Curiouser and Curiouser!: Open Social DH Modelling and Protoyping via AI Collaboration”
• Jon Bath, Anaya Elias (U Saskatchewan), “A Place for the Community: The Amigo’s Cantina Digital Archive”
• Brent Nelson, Leanne Chung (U Saskatchewan), “‘Hey, there, Sir! How can I help you today?’ Possible Futures for Machine Learning in Sustainable Digital Scholarship”
• Faraz Forghan Parast (U Victoria), “How Much AI is in Your Work? Making Labels for Self-disclosure and Epistemic Honesty”
• Gabrielle Benabdallah (U Washington), [Independent Viewing via https://doi.org/10.25547/0AR9-S848] “Staying Open to Interpretation: Reading Practices in AI-Mediated Scholarship”

10:00am – 10:30am: Break

10:30am – 11:30am: Keynote: Alyssa Arbuckle (CRKN/Érudit), “AI and Values-Based Open Social Scholarship”
Chair: Michael Sinatra (U Montréal)

11:30am – 1:00pm: INKE Business Meeting (by invitation)
Invitation is extended to all researchers and partners, plus those involved in INKE-supported activities

1:00pm – 2:00pm: Lunch (The second floor cafeteria is recommended, given timing)

2:00pm – 3:30pm: Workshops

• Alan Colín-Arce, Kyle Dase (U Victoria), “HSS Commons Community Consultation / Drop-in Session” (Room B-4215)
• Véronique Landry, Simon van Bellen (Érudit), “Update-a-thon: Keeping up with the Evolving Canadian Journal Landscape” (Room B-4205)

Call for papers

Re-Defining Open Social Scholarship in an Age of Generative ‘Intelligence’ — the 13th annual gathering of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership — will coincide with the annual conference of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / La société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN; csdh-schn.ca) and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI; dhsi.org) on the campus of Université de Montréal, 4-5 June 2026. It continues themes explored at the recent gathering of the Canadian Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS), aligned with the conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH; aa-dh.org), 2-3 December 2025 in Canberra.

Here, we continue our aim to mobilize knowledge, research, and professional experience around the benefits and challenges of developing and maintaining open scholarship in the current age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital platforms, as well as how best to coordinate open scholarship policies in ways that connect with related activities across Canada, Australia, and globally. The gathering also continues our tradition of celebrating and reflecting on the important, ongoing work of the open scholarship community.

Open scholarship emphasizes the social nature of knowledge, along with community-driven initiatives, outreach, and partnerships that aim to close gaps between academic theory, research, and communities beyond academic specialists. Even though many researchers now have unprecedented opportunities to share and collaborate with each other and the public, much scholarship still remains inaccessible to wider audiences. In contrast to this reality, open scholarship asserts that research publications, datasets, educational resources, and other output should be accessible to all.

Rapid advancements in AI, coupled with the expansion of open access research and digital infrastructures, are transforming open social research, public discourse, and creative practice. These shifts—spanning environmental, communal, social, creative, epistemic, and economic structures—demand urgent critical inquiry into the future of knowledge itself. Along with other disciplines, creative practice—itself a form of knowledge production in the academy and the wider world—is experiencing these shifts acutely. Moreover, the ‘data deluge’ in all disciplines presents both new possibilities and pressing challenges for digital researchers and engaged publics alike. Yet, while these issues are widely acknowledged across various fields, too often discussions remain siloed.

Together, we will consider how best to model open social scholarship practices, as well as pursue the following general themes (and beyond):

• Community: How can we foster humanities and social sciences research, development, community building, and engagement through online, omnipresent, and open community spaces?
• Training: How can we adapt existing training opportunities and develop new opportunities in emerging areas to meet academic, partner, and public needs for open scholarship training?
• Connection: How can humanities and social sciences researchers collaborate more closely with the general public? What are the best ways to bring the public into our work, as well as for bringing our work to the public?
• Policy: How do we ensure that research on pressing open scholarship topics is accessible to a diverse public, including those who develop organizational or national policy?

We invite you to join in conversations and share collaborative work in digital scholarship around the following questions, and other topics pertinent to our community beyond:

• How can open social scholarship, with its focus on community, openness, and engagement, provide more generous frameworks for understanding and shaping the shifts brought about by an increasingly algorithmic culture(s)?
• What opportunities and challenges do AI-driven systems present for the knowledge commons, public platforms, and scholarly engagement?
• What is the place of creative works and artistic practice within an evolving knowledge commons?
• How do we balance innovation with stewardship, maintenance, and preservation imperatives that are needed by cultural data?
• What is the future of the public domain and the platforms and collaborations required to sustain it?
• If AI relies on published works for its learning, how might we ensure reciprocal relationships are in place for those creating these works? And how might these relations be protected from exploitation?
• How do we avoid the risks of algorithmic monoculture and the homogenization of cultural formats and outputs?

Submission and Notification

• Submissions: before 1 February 2026 via this link
• Notification: Following peer review of submissions, corresponding authors or project leads will be notified by 15 February 2026.

Questions?

Don’t hesitate for reach out, via etcl@uvic.ca!