Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group Proposal March 2008
Defining New Forms of Scholarly Output in a Digital Age
The turn to the digital is creating new opportunities for scholarship, changing not only the way knowledge is created, transmitted and shared, but what it is possible to create and ultimately the nature of scholarship itself. Historically, it has been the sciences, in particular physics, that have been leaders in defining new practices and forms of scholarly communication, e.g., Physics Letters for rapid publication, AchivX for open access, etc. In 2002 a group of scholars meeting in Budapest issued a statement – the Budapest Open Access Initiative – that crystallized a series of longstanding concerns in the scientific academic community about the rising publication costs and restricted access to the scientific journal literature. The Open Access movement that evolved from this today calls for creating a content commons with unrestricted and free online access to the outputs of scholarly journal research. Research funding agencies, such as the Wellcome Institute (UK), the National Institutes of Health (USA) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) have mandated or recommended that the results of the research they fund be made available. Traditional journal publishers, who normally require authors to surrender copyright for the articles they publish, are responding by permitting authors to self-archive a version of their material openly, subject to various conditions. Clearly there are costs to making information accessible, but emerging partnerships among scholars, publishers, funders and libraries are experimenting with new forms of output and business models that are more appropriate to the digital age. While the international debates have focused to date on the sciences and scientific journals, it is timely to explore these issues in the humanities and social sciences.
It is important to recall that humanists have also been pioneers in experimenting with new forms of scholarly publishing. One of the first free electronic online journals, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review was a humanities journal, and Humanist, an international electronic seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities, is one of the longest running online discussion groups. However, with the exception of scholars in computing in the humanities, most humanists have had little interest in changes in the technical substrate. The University of Virginia’s 2005 report entitled Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities notes that while most humanists use basic tools such as word processors or spreadsheets, "only about six percent of humanist scholars go beyond general purpose information technology and use digital resources and more complex digital tools in their scholarship."[1] Moreover, while the amount of digital information (texts, images, and so on) available for humanities research has increased radically, allowing researchers to work with greater ease and speed, "there has not been a major shift in the definition of the scholarly process that is comparable to the revolutionary changes that have occurred in business and in scientific research." Independent of research, all humanist scholars publish so there is at least the need to explore how the digital is having an impact on the form and distribution of scholarly publications and possibly the nature of scholarly practice.
Why are humanities scholars slow to adapt or to take up new practices? Is this true across the humanities and is there variation within disciplines? Is it the lack of mentorship or models? Is it uncertainty about the merit of electronic publications and new forms of scholarly artifacts? Is it the lack of mechanisms for evaluating scholarship in more collaborative and participatory environments? Is it the lack of infrastructure, both social and technical that discourages scholars, especially young scholars, from engaging in untried practices? What incentives need to be put in place to entice young scholars to take advantage of the networked knowledge environment?
A number of recent reports on digital humanities scholarship have addressed the need to redefine scholarly output in a digital age.[2] Monographs remain the primary intellectual currency for humanists, and reputation and credentials are still largely based on the imprimatur and prestige of the publisher, and scholars retain their copyright. But there is evidence of change. The potential to create and use multimedia to support the scholarly apparatus in fields in which the visual is integral, however, suggest it will only be a matter of time until the potential of digital media is embraced. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council[3] in their 2006 report Peer Review and Evaluation of Digital Resources for the Arts and Humanities focus on redefining the “research-oriented product” in the humanities, and characterize a "digital resource" as "any material useful for research which is made publicly available in a digital format." The report focuses closely on the relationship of content and technological infrastructure, explaining that "content and structure do not function discretely in a digital context." They further argue that there is need to raise awareness in the academy of the "scholarly-technical" expertise of faculty involved in the development of humanities technology resources. The report includes an Appendix with a thorough set of recommended guidelines for reviewers of digital resources that address content, presentation, usability, "added value" and other factors. These changing patterns of knowledge creation and consumption, the current emphasis on the importance of knowledge mobilisation by scholars, and the global movement toward opening access to scholarship and the creation of a digital content commons, all suggest that humanities scholarship will change in a digital age. It is critical that scholars be the one defining and shaping these changes.
Working Group Participants
The Working Group will bring together senior and junior faculty and graduate students in the humanities and social sciences from across all three campuses, each of whom has interest in exploring the potential of the digital humanities for defining new modes of scholarship and scholarly output, and the role of open access in the humanities. A Working Group chair will be selected at the first meeting.
Daniel BenderAsst. Prof., History, UTSC
Leslie ChanSenior Lecturer & Prog Supervisor for New Media Studies, UTSC & KMDI
Frances Garrett Asst. Prof., Center for the Study of Religion (CSR)
Matt King Doctoral Student, CSR
Gale Moore Director, KMDI, and Asst. Prof., Sociology & ICC (UTM)
Kathleen Reilly Doctoral Student, Political Science
Virginia Lee Strain Doctoral Student, English
Shafique Virani Asst. Prof., Dept. of Historical Studies, UTM, and CSR
Ben Wood Doctoral Student, CSR
Working Group Activities
The Working Group will meet once a month throughout the academic year, and will launch a blog to circulate their findings, post relevant materials and engage colleagues. It will review the published literature to gain a more thorough understanding of how scholars in the humanities are responding, where and in what disciplines change is most advanced. One or more scholars prominent in the digital humanities will be invited for consultation, and to give a public lecture. There is potential to conduct a survey {see covering letter), and we will evaluate the feasibility of developing a collaborative grant proposal, such as a SSHRC Research Development Initiative. A workshop on an aspect of the digital humanities identified by the WG will be held at the end of the year to share our findings with the University. In brief, our activities will increase our understanding, raise awareness of the issues in the community and possibly identify new opportunities for humanities scholars afforded by the turn to the digital.
Budget
1 or 2 visiting scholarsTravel, accommodation, honorarium / $ 3,000
Workshop (UofT) & hospitality / $ 500
Hospitality for meetings / $ 1,000
Blog * / 0
Miscellaneous – telecommunications charges, photocopying, etc. / 500
Total / $5,000
* We will use open source software and serve this from one of our units.
[1] http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/
[2] See for example, The University as Publisher: Summary of a Meeting Held at UC Berkeley on November 1, 2007 http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/university_publisher.pdf ; “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences ; MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages ; Guidelines for Evaluating Faculty Research, Teaching and Community Service in the Digital Age http://www.mtholyoke.edu/committees/facappoint/guidelines.shtml
[3]