Abstracts
Featured speaker
Tim Sherratt (U Canberra), “DIY Infrastructure – Building the GLAM Workbench”
The GLAM Workbench (https://glam-workbench.net/) is a collection of Jupyter notebooks and related resources that encourages exploration of collection data from GLAM organisations (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). Using Jupyter notebooks, researchers can run live code to manipulate and analyse data – developing their skills, and learning about the possibilities of digital collections, while undertaking real research tasks.
The GLAM Workbench has always sought to provide researchers with multiple pathways, responding to their interests, aims, and digital confidence. Some of the notebooks run as web apps, requiring nothing more than a couple of clicks to run. Others are aimed at more experienced coders, providing live examples of what’s possible using collection APIs. Similarly, the notebooks can be used in a variety of computing contexts – one click will launch the Binder service, but for more sustained work there are options to use Docker images, Reclaim Cloud, or other cloud facilities. Different users can follow different pathways.
Without direct funding or institutional support, the GLAM Workbench has sought to achieve sustainability by opening its contents and processes to reuse, collaboration, automation and integration. There is no single platform that needs to be maintained, instead the GLAM Workbench takes advantage of existing standards and technologies to connect resources as required. Most recently, tools and documentation have been added to support individuals and organisations that want to contribute to the GLAM Workbench. For example, a standardised GitHub repository template has been developed for any GLAM organisation that wants to create its own section of the GLAM Workbench (or indeed, its very own version of the GLAM Workbench).
Lightning Talks
Paul Arthur and Lydia Hearn (Edith Cowan U), “Altmetrics in the Humanities”
This talk considers how changes to bibliometric evaluation toward greater use of altmetrics may enhance uptake of open scholarship in the humanities. We summarise how altmetrics compare with traditional metrics, the potential for alternative metrics as indicators for research assessment, and discuss some of the current concerns voiced by academics. Until recently, research outputs at the university, faculty, and individual levels have been assessed primarily according to peer-reviewed publications and their citation analysis to illustrate quantifiable, material, and tangible results. Yet this approach has never favoured the humanities, for which journal impact factors and overall citation indices tend to be lower, with studies often focused on more localised contextual issues or published through detailed archives or manuscripts, the visible outcomes of which may be long-term. The emerging policy discourse around research now focuses on greater citizen participation in and co-construction of knowledge so that research findings can be shared, challenged, and, where possible, used and reproduced by and for the public and all intended users rather than being hidden behind publication paywalls. The social web, with its many applications, can promote participation, interconnections, and social interaction, which can be tracked via altmetrics. These virtual public spaces allow for the sharing, reuse, analysis, and management of data in new ways and for researchers, community stakeholders, and local citizens to work together to explore and solve research challenges through new cross-disciplinary lenses.
van den Boom, Freyja (U Ottawa), “Unmanned Futures, the Study Of and Through Arts-based Research on AI”
To contribute to the discussions on how to govern and regulate AI and Human interactions dealing with the legal and ethical challenges this research through the use of arts-based methoin the context of AI and data governance. In response to the need for cutting-edge contributions this talk will also be an opportunity to challenge the dominant academic conference presentation format. It will take the form of a provocation and an invitation to join a network of (but not limited to) people interested in the role of arts and speculative design to help improve (transdisciplinary research on) AI governance by acknowledging the need for more diverse and inclusive means and messengers. Arts based research helps to create spaces for under represented communities to engage with AI developers and policymakers, not only sharing their lived experiences, expertise and alternative solutions but to be active decisionmakers about the use of AI for the future worlds we want to live in.
Duncan, Ian (Australian Research Data Commons), “Sharing is Caring? Approaches to Addressing Research on Sensitive Data”
Abstract forthcoming.
El Khatib, Randa (U Toronto), “The Impacts and Challenges of Digital Pedagogy in an Increasingly Open Culture”
Embracing new media and digital technologies in higher education has caused a profound shift in training and pedagogy, especially in the last few years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that caused a sudden and drastic shift toward digital modes of pedagogy and training. This shift poses several challenges for higher education, ranging from how digital training and pedagogy can be adopted in the classroom, curricula, and universities, to thinking about best practices for engaging and training active publics. These concerns are also the focus of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership’s (2021) Training Cluster, co-facilitated by Constance Crompton (U Ottawa) and Laura Estill (St. Francis Xavier University) who pose the research question “What innovative training strategies and approaches improve digital literacy, information-seeking, and knowledge production for students, researchers, industry, and engaged members of the public, within a theoretical framework of open scholarship?” Taking up this question, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria has authored a Training annotated bibliography that brings together key readings divided into two broad sections — “Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Training” and “Open Resources” — that are concerned with digital pedagogy and training in the context of open scholarship. This presentation will offer a snapshot of the annotated bibliography that looks at digital pedagogy theory and practice, and addresses its impacts and challenges in an increasingly open culture.
Fewster, Jenny (Australian Research Data Commons), “Creating an Australian HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons”
Although the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) and Indigenous (HASS+I) sector represents a significant portion of research conducted in Australia, it has only received relatively minor investment in digital research infrastructure to date. This has restricted the availability of HASS+I data to researchers, constrained the widespread uptake of analytical and computational approaches in HASS and Indigenous research and limited the development of digital skills among HASS+I researchers.
The HASS Research Data Commons (HASS RDC) and Indigenous Research Capability (IRC) Program was announced in 2020 as a first step toward developing a more comprehensive digital HASS+I research capability. It aims to create the founding blocks of a national research infrastructure that serves key domains in HASS+I and reaches out both to communities where the data originates and research communities who work with data in: quantitative social sciences, language-based research, and research using the National Library’s Trove platform. It also aims to develop Indigenous researcher capability in working with such data.
One year into the HASS RDC program, four projects have been set up, each of which will deliver the technical, data, training and engagement elements that contribute towards a distributed digital research ecosystem for HASS+I communities. A number of integration activities have been designed to knit these elements into a future national research infrastructure with an open and flexible architecture that aligns with existing infrastructure components and can accommodate future expansion of HASS RDC and IRC Program.
This Lightning talk will share key insights from consulting with the research community and recount the early work in the HASS RDC and IRC Program.
Glowacki, Stefan (U Amsterdam), “‘Media Art on Wikipedia’: Within the Digital Ecology of Knowledge”
“Media Art on Wikipedia” is a collaborative project launched by Amsterdam-based platform for media art LIMA, conducted in partnership with national and international art collections, national universities and Wikimedia Nederland. Involving coordination of edit-a-thons and ingest of collection metadata within the structure of Wikidata, the project aims to bridge and mobilize the domain knowledge of media art beyond the institutional silo through engagement with the ethos, procedures and affordances of the Wikimedia ecosystem. This article profiles and situates this attempt within the particular institutional context of media art and the broader turn towards open, participatory and distributed configuration of public institutions.
Comparing infrastructural topologies identified within the discourse of media art by mapping them to tensions between centralized and distributed approaches, this article positions the project as a composite of models blurring their unambiguous theoretical distinction. This analysis serves to investigate ways in which the project responds to the conditions underlying the field’s modes of knowledge production – on one hand the demand for the reimagining of methods of documentation, preservation, and historicization stemming from the specificity of media art; and the systemic precarity of media art’s knowledge infrastructures on the other.
Jensen, Graham (U Victoria), “Connecting Researchers and Research Communities: (Re)introducing the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons”
This lightning talk will introduce the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, sharing highlights from the project’s Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences event series as well as its ongoing community-building efforts with national and international partners.
The Canadian 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, 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.
The talk will conclude with a brief summary of the INKE Partnership’s ongoing and projected work with specific research communities or groups (such as the Environments of Change project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the open access journal Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities). In the process, it will also reflect on how digital research commons of this kind can facilitate effective knowledge mobilization by providing tools for open access publication and collaboration that align with established and evolving best practices in Canada and beyond.
Saklofske, Jon (Acadia U), “Imagining Ourselves Otherwise: Performance Metrics as Detrimental to Open Social Scholarship”
Working at a primarily undergraduate university allows me to sidestep many of the metrics requirements (impact factors, performance-based funding, university rankings, etc.) facing colleagues at larger institutions. However, even smaller universities are affected by this competitive ‘survive and thrive’ strategy necessitated by a lack of adequate government support for what should be sustainable public institutions. In response to such underfunding, institutions have diversified revenue sources to include corporate investment, business and industry collaborations, and targeted capital campaign donations—the success of which depend on an institution’s ranking and reputation, its investment potential. Universities have accepted and adopted performance metrics to resemble and compete with the businesses that governments and other corporations are willing to invest in.
Such top-down standardizations signify a managerial lack of trust in the capacity of faculty to self-govern and articulate our value to others. These, along with altmetrics (non-traditional online bibliometrics) measurements, quantify and misrepresent humanities work in reductive ways. This paper argues that relying on such rankings and ratings as indicators of engagement, value, and impact aligns our work with commercial interests, skews motivation toward popular and populist trends and topics, and is ultimately detrimental to the breadth, richness, and diversity of open social scholarship. It goes on to suggest several strategies to strengthen the distance between open social scholarship practices and such derivative performance metrics: faculty union interventions, a commitment by tenured faculty to facilitate empowerment for junior colleagues apart from such metrics, and a pedagogical shift toward trust, kindness, and ungrading to model alternative ways of thinking about and for students.
Winter, Caroline (UVic), “Building Community with the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory”
This lightning talk provides an overview of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory and a snapshot of the policy landscape it describes. The OS Policy Observatory is an open, online hub for resources about open scholarship policy. An initiative of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership, it was launched in 2017 in response to a need identified by members of the INKE community, recognizing the importance of policy to open scholarship and the challenge of keeping up with policy developments. INKE, an international research network for fostering open social scholarship, is a highly collaborative endeavour, with partners and members across Canada (including CAPOS), in the US, and in Australia, and collaboration is essential to the OS Policy Observatory as well.
The OS Policy Observatory takes a broad view of open scholarship policy, considering reports, activities, and trends as well as formal policy documents with direct or indirect implications for open scholarship. The descriptive policy overviews it presents consider the significance of a given policy or development for INKE’s extended community as well as for open scholarship overall, providing a foundation for stakeholders’ own policy development as well as policy recommendations on issues affecting our community.
This talk synthesizes and summarizes some of the findings of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory so far and a research scan based upon it, offering a snapshot of the current open scholarship policy landscape as outlined by INKE’s extended community, its trends over time, and the roads that lie ahead.
Wang, Zhiwei (U Edinburgh), “Being Chinese Online – Discursive (Re)production of Internet-Mediated Chinese National Identity”
Much stress has been placed on the political dimension of Chinese national(ist) discourses online, which neglects other dimensions constitutive of their discursive nature. A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are daily (re)shaped online by diverse socio-political actors is crucial, which can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Internet-mediated Chinese national sentiments but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world. I adopt an ethnographic methodology. ‘Fieldsites’ are China-based digital platforms Sina Weibo and bilibili. My primary data collection method is virtual ethnographic observation of everyday national(ist) discussions on both sites. If data obtained from observations cannot answer research questions, I will conduct in-depth online interviews with ‘key actors’ identified from observations in discursively (re)producing Chinese national identity on each ‘fieldsite’, to complement data gathered through observations. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse data. From November 2021 to August 2022, I conducted 26 weeks’ observations with 26 sets of fieldnotes. Based on fieldnotes of the first week’s observations, I found multifarious national(ist) discourses on both ‘fieldsites’. Second, Sina Weibo and bilibili users have agency in interpreting and deploying concrete national(ist) discourses despite the leading role played by the government and the two platforms in deciding on the basic framework of national expressions. Third, the (re)production process of national(ist) discourses on both platforms depends upon not only technical affordances and limitations of the two sites but also, to a larger degree, some established socio-political mechanisms and conventions in the offline China.