Abstracts

Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Australasia

Tuesday November 28th – Wednesday November 29th, 2023

Featured Speakers

Miller, Gabriel (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), “Scholarly Books in the Digital Age: A Canadian Perspective

For generations the scholarly monograph has been a cornerstone of research and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, but what does the future hold for scholarly books? What are the implications of recent developments, whether it is digitization, the open science movement, or the growing reliance on academic journals to publish research findings? Drawing on new research and recent lessons from its own Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences is well positioned to help lead this discussion about the opportunities and challenges facing scholarly books in Canada, and to contribute insights on preserving the vital role of long form publishing in knowledge creation and dissemination.

Missingham, Roxanne (Australian National U), “23 Years: What Have We Learnt in OA and What Gaps Remain in the National Ecosystem?

2023 is the 23rd anniversary of the first open repository in Australia and the 20th anniversary of the first Australian university open access policy. If we have now reached the age of maturity what have we learnt as a nation from the developments?

Major achievements have indicated that universities, particularly libraries and presses, can make major change. Nationally we seen a diversity of initiatives in open access journals, primarily humanities and social science disciplines, participation in archives such as SSRN and ArXive and a very small number of open access presses making remarkable progress. Impact has been significant. ANU Press and research content in the repository has had more than 100,000,000 views and downloads. Citation impact shows that there is a considerable increasing use of resources – particularly theses.

Read and publish agreements emerged in 2020/21 and have opened up thousands of articles each year. The benefits to academics in terms of reducing fees (APCs) and achieving administrative efficiencies are significant.

Digitisation of historic research has also opened up a wealth of research of national significance.

What are the gaps? There is a lack of effective OA discovery in the national bibliographic system, a lack of national policy and discussion about authors rights is also limited with much resting in the hands of international publishing company practices and a Copyright Act that fails to meet modern needs.

It is time to revitalise nations discussions for the next steps in OA.

Niemann, Tanja (Érudit), “The Evolution of a Digital Publishing Platform in Canada”

Érudit supports scholarly journals and their dissemination while the erudit.org platform is one of the main access points to Canadian research outputs in the humanities and social sciences in French and in English. The past twenty years have been marked by significant changes, including the transition to open access and the endorsement of the principles of open science by policymakers, universities, and scholarly societies. By studying the evolution of Érudit, we will paint a portrait of the issues of knowledge dissemination that affect the scientific community today, in Canada and abroad.

Lightning Talks and Panelists

Arthur, Paul (Edith Cowan U), “Community-Based Open Knowledge”

Community-based open knowledge, in all its forms, has particular relevance for the humanities, especially in terms of the current “impact” agenda that is encouraging researchers to respond to pressing contemporary concerns and show how their investigations are making a difference and engaging the public. Academics are experimenting with citizen humanities approaches that support and value connecting with communities to help shape research directions and questions, reaching many who may not be traditionally aligned with—or be an expected audience for—scholarly work.

The wealth of local and first-hand knowledge that can now be crowdsourced adds depth and detail to social and cultural projects where individual and situated experience can provide crucial understanding. For the humanities, this can include participation in a range of tasks, such as transcribing handwritten text; correcting digitized content; categorizing and cataloguing information with structured, descriptive metadata; collaborative tagging; implicit and explicit linking of data; providing contextual details for artifacts; locating complementary objects to be included in an online collection; recording memories and intangible heritage; commenting and offering critical reflections; mapping visual, spatial, and cultural representations; translating content; and co-curation.

Along with the benefits, crowdsourcing presents known challenges. Ethical issues around “free labour” remain a concern. Even so, crowdsourcing represents one of the most visible and widespread examples of two-way open humanities in action. The capacity to empower community members through seeking and utilizing their input to add to or modify existing understandings sets it apart from the kind of open approach that permits entry into spaces where scholarly knowledge can be viewed but not altered.

Barnett, Tully (Flinders U), “Open Scholarship and the Foundational Economy”

New ways of thinking about balancing human needs, climate justice, and equality, such as Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics or the work of Foundational Economy Collective, seek to redraw the basic interconnections between humans, public policy and the economy. In Doughnut Economics the Sustainable Development Goals are used to create a framework for meeting human needs without destroying the planet. Meanwhile, the Foundational Economy is a frame of thinking about the civic infrastructure of basic or foundational goods and services that serve the needs of daily life rather than an economy obsessed with growth. At the core of both of these new frameworks is the idea of the commons. But neither framework gives much attention to arts and culture, digital cultural or research infrastructures, or information literacies and needs. This paper considers the relationship between open social scholarship, digital media studies and foundational economy looking for ways of understanding the implications of this new thinking digital cultural life, research and the digital humanities.

Borchert, Martin (CAUL; University of New South Wales), “The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) Providing Essential and Open Research Infrastructure”

The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) is the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia and New Zealand. CAUL members are the University Librarians or equivalent of the thirty-nine institutions that have representation on Universities Australia (UA) and the eight University Librarians or equivalent of the institutions that have representation on Universities New Zealand (UNZ) and who form the Council of New Zealand University Librarians (CONZUL), a committee of UNZ.

CAUL has a long history of supporting open access to knowledge and there have been a large number of investments and projects to achieve continuous improvements over time, leveraging available technologies, infrastructures, publishing models and partnerships. These include the Australian Digital Theses project, investment in open access institutional repositories, rights retention, the transition from read access to open access publishing and cost containment via the CAUL Content Procurement Service and membership of the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) to help sustain not-for-profit open science infrastructure. CAUL works closely with partners such as CAUDIT, Open Access Australasia on advocacy, capacity and capability building, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), ARC and NHMRC research funders, the Office of the Chief Scientist, and scholarly societies.

CAUL initiatives and partnerships are delivering increasing open access publishing by which almost also theses are publishing open, many research datasets are open, and between 40%-70% (per member institution) of research publications are published openly. To continue the drive towards open, CAUL will need to support whichever channels to open best meet the needs of its member institutions, to reach 80 or 90% open.

Brass, Kylie (Australian Academy of the Humanities), “Policy Challenges and Opportunities in the Generative AI Era”

The Australian Academy of the Humanities has a long-standing interest in ensuring the humanities have the best available national infrastructure to meet both urgent and longer-term research priorities, to create and collaborate at scale, and to facilitate digital and data transformation. How does the advent of ‘generative AI’ change the landscape? Several policy reform processes are underway in higher education and research and we have successes to build on in the national collaborative research infrastructure space. In my presentation, I’ll reflect on some of the challenges and opportunities for our disciplines and draw on work the Academy has led on generative AI and data-enabled research.

Burrows, Simon (Western Sydney U), “Building Digital Humanities: An Update”

In November 2022, Western Sydney University and Gale, in partnership with the University of Pondichery, convened an three week international online symposium entitled ‘Building Digital Humanities.’ The event – for which CAPOS was a nominal sponsor – was a resounding success, attracting over 700 registrations from around the world, including significant numbers from centres of emerging DH strength in Africa, India and Central Asia. This update will discuss the event and its afterlife and legacy.

Dase, Kyle (U Victoria), “Contemplating Grant-Funded Project Infrastructure as Collaboration from the Ground Up”

DH and other research projects in the humanities often engage in collaboration at a point in project development that presents challenges in compatibility and interoperability. For instance, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) is a vital Canadian initiative aimed at “empowering researchers to link their data”, but most of the projects they engage with are already established with bespoke data sets. As a result, the majority of the labour involved entails converting already-established ontologies and data structures so that they are interoperable with other projects.

Likewise, a large, grant-funded projects such as Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is an excellent scholarly project with incredibly successful community outreach and an equally successful publication record. Moreover, their datasets and project code are readily available online in a gesture towards openness. However, the bespoke nature and complexity of such a project makes the likelihood of other scholars or community members reusing this code, or even its data, very unlikely.

This presentation envisions beginning work on collaborative projects and infrastructure from the ground up by including shareholders and colleagues in conversations about the potential for and development of a project from as early as its inception. I use my own work as an example, starting with the Network Edition as a theoretical chapter in my dissertation, to its current state as a working prototype. I argue that involving even limited potential partners in a tool’s development from the outset makes for more innovative scholarship, farther-reaching projects, and a better use of publicly-granted funds.

El Khatib, Randa (U Victoria) and Leslie Chan (U Toronto), “Implementing UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science: A Focus on Open Infrastructure”

This paper outlines the development of a case study that applies UNESCO’s Recommendations for Open Science, with a specific emphasis on open infrastructure within the regional hubs of the Knowledge for Change Consortium for Training in Community Based Participatory Research, co-founded by Dr. Budd Hall (University of Victoria, Canada) and Dr. Rajesh Tandon (PRIA, India), UNESCO Chairs in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education. UNESCO defines open science as principles and practices that render research accessible and beneficial to society, encompassing not only the sciences but also humanities and social sciences. This includes tiered knowledge access and adherence to open standards that are inclusive, equitable, and sustainable (UNESCO 2022). Collaborating with the Knowledge for Change network, with its globally distributed regional hubs, the study examines practical strategies for adopting and customizing open infrastructure and strives to understand the network’s research processes, technical infrastructure needs, and differences among regional hubs while promoting community cohesion.

The case study utilizes Humanities Commons as a community-based open infrastructure, involving the establishment of regional hubs and contributing research to a shared repository. In the planning stage, the project aims to launch with at least five initial Knowledge for Change regional hubs, learning about necessary support and providing insights for incorporating all regional hubs, with a goal to develop a use case that might support the project and help other projects adopt open infrastructure aligning with UNESCO’s Open Science Recommendations.

Falk, Michael (U Melbourne), Tamson Pietsch (U Technology Sydney), & Heather Ford (U Technology Sydney), “The Need for Mixed Infrastructure: The Case of Wikipedia Studies”

What kind of infrastructure does digital research require? We present the case for a capacious view of ‘digital infrastructure’, based on our experience in Wikipedia Studies. Wikipedia is born-digital. Data streams out of it by the terabyte. To make sense of this surging datastream, scholars require adequate ‘digital infrastructure’ in the narrow sense of ‘infrastructure which is digital’. They need client libraries to access Wikipedia’s APIs, high-performance computing resources that can handle Wikipedia’s large database dumps, and digital publishing platforms where analysis can be shared. But this is only part of the story. Like other social networks, Wikipedia reflects the practices, ideals, meanings, hopes and skullduggeries of its human protagonists. Perhaps more than any other social network, Wikipedia is dominated by a highly skilled subset of power users who have mastered Wikipedia’s systems and can shape the stream of data to reflect their own wishes. To understand this aspect of Wikipedia, scholars require another kind of ‘digital infrastructure’, namely ‘infrastructure to support the understanding of the digital’. This kind of infrastructure is largely intangible: it is the know-how, the concepts, the personal connections, the cunning required to enter the datastream and observe it as a stream of culture. Only with both kinds of infrastructure can Wikipedia scholars—particularly at the start of their careers—develop into hybrid data-scientist-ethnographers capable of engaging with Wikipedia on both fronts. At wikihistories, we are trying to build up the mixed infrastructure required to support such hybrid scholars, and bridge the divide between computational social science and digital ethnography more broadly. We are developing a new R client library for Wikipedia, wikkitidy, and plan to develop a range of tools and training events to embed wikkitidy in a larger ethnographic research program.

Fewster, Jenny (Australian Research Data Commons), “Creating the Australian HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons”

In 2020 the HASS Research Data Commons (HASS RDC) and Indigenous Research Capability (IRC) Program was announced as a first step toward developing a more comprehensive digital HASS and Indigenous research capability. It has created the founding blocks of a national research infrastructure that serves key domains in HASS and Indigenous research 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 nation’s cultural collections. It also aims to develop Indigenous researcher capability in working with such data.

Two years into the HASS and Indigenous RDC program, five projects have been set up, each of which have delivered the technical, data, training and engagement elements that contribute towards a distributed digital research ecosystem for HASS and Indigenous communities. Those projects are:
1. The Language Data Commons of Australia. LDaCA capitalises on existing infrastructure, rescue vulnerable and dispersed collections, and link with improved analysis environments for new research outcomes.
2. Integrated Research Infrastructure for Social Sciences. IRISS provides a foundational infrastructure for the acquisition, storage, documentation and dissemination of social science data and extensible systems for the capture, documentation, preservation and analysis of data in near to real-time.
3. Improving Indigenous Research Capabilities. IIRC has laid the foundation to build national Indigenous research capabilities, framed by a set of agreed Indigenous Data Governance principles that can leverage existing data assets, linking them with new and existing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data assets. .
4. Community Data Lab. CDL has created a platform for researchers to access and analyse cultural collecting institutions data via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
5. Trove Enhancements project. This project has focused on the enhancement of the Research landing pages accessible through Trove, Australia’s unique public heritage site which is operated by the National Library of Australia.

Henrickson, Leah (U Queensland), “Digital Storytelling for Collaborative Scholarship”

“Storytelling is an integral part of the human experience, and has been for the entirety of human existence. We understand who we are and our relationships with the world around us through the stories we tell ourselves. Yet scholars routinely reject stories and storytelling in favour of more generalised and quantitative evidence and methods perceived as more ‘objective’. This is despite acknowledgement that such evidence and methods are hardly objective at all, and often work to dehumanise the very subjects they are framed as benefitting (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020).

I argue here for conscious integration of storytelling into research for more open, fair, and social scholarship. Specifically, I advocate for the inclusion of digital ‘story thinking’ approaches to scholarship that facilitate critical reflection upon pasts and presents for futures thinking through collaborative discourse. Recent research shows that story thinking can encourage participants to inhabit possible futures, empathise with others, envision future events, and engage with different groups in a shared vision (Marshall, Wilkins, and Bennett 2023). While story thinking cannot – and should not – replace established scholarly practices, it can serve as a valuable complement to these practices; story thinking’s accessibility and adaptability can support its use in a variety of settings, with a wide range of participants. This lightning talk will elaborate upon recent story thinking research to propose the incorporation of ‘story thinking through digital storytelling’ exercises in an array of teaching, boardroom, policymaking, and research spaces. The accompanying longer paper will suggest some such exercises.

Jensen, Graham (U Victoria), “Creative Forms of Open Social Scholarship in the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons: Case Studies”

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

This lightning talk will include highlights from the project’s Building Digital Communities in the Humanities and Social Sciences event series (May and June 2023), as well as its ongoing community-building efforts with national and international partners. In line with the program theme for Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship, the talk will conclude with a brief overview of some of the ways that members of the INKE Partnership community have begun to use the Canadian HSS Commons in both expected and unexpected ways as a tool for open social scholarship. To showcase these unexpected or “creative” forms of open social scholarship, we will focus in particular on our recent work with Iter Canada and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. As these collaborations demonstrate, we are interested not only in continuing to study the theoretical underpinnings of digital research commons, but also in testing and documenting our own experiments in open social scholarship of various kinds (e.g., journal publishing and archiving, event organization, and content management involving complex access and file-sharing scenarios). By sharing these experiments with the larger communities to which we belong—both in Canada and abroad—we hope to contribute to ongoing as well as nascent conversations about how open digital research infrastructure and tools can be leveraged to redefine HSS research and its possible applications.

Lawrence, Amanda (ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society (ADM+S), RMIT U), “Wikimedia, Reliability and Bibliodiversity”

Since is was established in 2002, Wikipedia has become one of the most visited websites in the world (https://www.semrush.com/website/top) and is the only non-commercial platform in the top ten sites. Wikipedia therefore plays a key role in the information ecosystem, from breaking news to scholarly research – both as a content producer and a network of knowledge resources. Despite its success Wikimedia projects are in a constant battle to maintain verifiability and credibility, as well as combat mis and dis-information both within the platform and via external sources. A key part of Wikimedia’s defence system is its content and citation policies however these have changed little in 20 years and Wikipedia’s reliable sources policies are still grounded in traditional notions of the research publishing economy as primarily commercial and scholarly publishers and mainstream news media. This is problematic in a dynamic digital media economy where a huge range of new formats and genres have come online. This bibliodiversity is particularly apparent for public policy and public interest topics which tend to have a more diverse media economy of sources, including organisations based in government, civil society, education and commercial sectors, and genres such as reports, policy briefs, fact sheets and datasets. In this presentation I will briefly touch on some of the complex issues facing Wikimedia and how the polices and actions within the platform intersect with the broader landscape of open social scholarship particularly for public interest issues.

Lindgren, Mia (DASSH, U Tasmania), “Reaching New Audiences – Podcasting the Academy”

Australia has surpassed the US as the world leader in podcast listening, with 43% of the population aged 12+ listening to a podcast in the last month (Infinite Dial, 2023). Podcasting is also favoured by academics, with podcast production now commonly included in funding applications as ways to disseminate and translate research. It’s a flexible medium requiring low entry skills and is relatively cheap to produce for simple formats like Q&A. Most importantly, podcasting with no set durations and production conventions, is well suited to house academic debate in a setting familiar to the public.

This talk will focus on three podcast case studies to illustrate how podcasting is increasingly used to amplify academic work and how the seemingly simple act of talking and listening can showcase research to the publics in engaging ways. It explores how podcasting is used by universities to both market and create research impact; and how podcast production can generate new knowledge about the medium through non-traditional research outputs (NTRO).

Nolan, Maggie (U Queensland), “The Challenges of Open Access for a Subscription Database”

“This lighting talk seeks to explore how a subscription database might be able to negotiate moving to open access in a time of precarity and limited funding. AustLit is one of Australia’s oldest and most venerable pieces of national digital research infrastructure in the humanities, a bibliographical database housing over a million records and a site for over 75 research projects and curated datasets, including BlackWords.

BlackWords, which was launched by Uncle Sam Watson in 2006, contains records for published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems, and secondary works and includes works in English, in translations and in Australian languages and records information about the lives and works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers and the literary cultures and traditions that influenced them. It also covers other forms of creative writing including film and television criticism and scholarship by and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling cultures.

AustLit and BlackWords are vital sources of information, but also knowledge creation and cross-cultural engagement, but these resources face challenges in living up to the ideal of FAIR and CARE. In this talk, I hope to show what AustLit is and does and ask questions about how it can be made both accessible and sustainable into the future.

Siemens, Lynne (U Victoria), “Fitting Together the Pieces of the Puzzle: Collaboration and Open Social Scholarship”

Open social scholarship is characterized by teams of academic specialists and non-specialists working together to create, disseminate, and engage research in wider contexts than originally envisioned. But what are the best ways to do this? How can researchers and those beyond the academy work together to further project goals? Studying the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, with its team of researchers and partner organizations who work together to advance knowledge of open social scholarship, is one way to answer these questions. This paper explores the nature of collaboration within INKE, its benefits and challenges, and measures of success through the analysis of yearly interviews of team members, researchers, and partners. It will focus on the collaboration’s first and second years of teamwork and include some reflection on collaboration in the age of COVID.

Smith, Ros (Australian National U) and Julia Rodwell (Australian National U), “Beyond the Book: Creating a Digital Exhibition of the Emmerson collection at State Library Victoria”

This paper introduces the Beyond the Book digital exhibition of the 2015 bequest of 5000 early modern books, pamphlets and manuscripts to State Library Victoria: https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/beyondthebook/. Funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant, the project’s interdisciplinary team collaborated for four years to design an exhibition that allowed general and scholarly access to the collection, through a series of stories supported by high-quality images and 3D photogrammetry. The exhibition also contains an integrated index using Research Space to structure its Linked Open Data, and elements of the exhibition will be ingested into SLV’s catalogue. This lightning talk will highlight the processes behind making the exhibition, its capacity-building elements, and its reach in bringing new audiences to old books.

van Wanrooy, Brigid (Analysis & Policy Observatory), “Connecting Policymakers and Researchers for Evidence-based Policy”

Traditionally, academic work has been rated and judged in terms of the impact on knowledge creation. But increasingly funding bodies want to know how academic research is creating societal impact. While research impact is typically evident in science and technology where patents and new products and services can be counted; it has proved more challenging in the social sciences and humanities. The situation is further challenged by the emergence of artificial intelligence, where answers and information are automatically generated with no attribution to the original source. How can scholars create impact in the social science and policy worlds, and how can it be measured?

APO is Australia and New Zealand’s largest open access repository of policy and research published by organisations such as governments, universities, research institutes, and community organisations. The accessibility and currency of this material makes it an ideal source of research and information to support evidence-based policymaking. This talk focuses on how the Analysis & Policy Observatory (APO) can support academics to create impact – now and into the future – by connecting them with policymakers, practitioners, and a public audience, and to measure this engagement for a better understanding of the impact they create.

Williams, Marni (U Sydney, Australian National U), “Digital Publishing as a Generative Practice? Introducing a New Nodal Infrastructure for Creative Research Communication”

This presentation will preview four collaborative digital publication projects currently underway at Power Publications. Each project considers the type of relations that form within a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural research project and brings them to the fore in its presentation: from the mapped knowledge and spatial disruptions that arose from within a site-specific research project across Southeast Asia to the collaborative and networked nature of an art history developed within and alongside an international women’s art collective. These projects not only signal my small academic imprint’s impending expansion beyond traditional linear publishing practices and formats, they have also each contributed to a larger goal: to develop an open-source, interoperable research communication infrastructure that combines the visualisation tools of the digital humanities with the media-rich content and immersive interfaces of digital storytelling.

The infrastructure takes a nodal approach, allowing scholars and publics to facet their own ways through and reorder content of all kinds—documents and media, data and sources, information and narratives—according to different languages, values, needs and perspectives. Each project therefore presents knowledge in flexible ways, testing the boundaries of the academic text. The projects have provided the testing ground for my PhD research at ANU, through which I have been developing a generative model for research communication informed by creative practice. Seeking to provide an alternative to the academic- and text–centric structures that commonly drive scholarly interpretation, my hope is that a more generative, creative and iterative practice of research communication can lead to greater equity amongst and fluidity between systems of knowledge.