Strategies for Promoting Social Scholarship

As I noted in my last post, the development of collaborative, online, open access scholarship (which I’ll call “social scholarship”) faces some significant obstacles, including cultural barriers, concerns about intellectual property, and the need for sound economic models for open access publications. But I think social scholarship can and will grow. Here are [...]

Obstacles to social scholarship

As I noted in an earlier post, humanities scholars are beginning to experiment with social scholarship, embracing open access, creating and using social networking sites and collaborative tools, and undertaking joint research projects. But I must acknowledge that social scholarship (which I’m using as a catch-all term to include open access, web 2.0, and [...]

Signs that social scholarship is catching on in the humanities

To what extent are humanities researchers practicing “social scholarship”—embracing openness, accessibility and collaboration in producing their work? In defining the characteristics of the humanities cyberinfrastructure, the report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure recommends that it should be “accessible” and “facilitate collaboration.” At the same time, the report contends that solitary scholarship is [...]

Social Scholarship in the Humanities

Scholarship seems to be getting more visibly social. According to Laura Cohen, social scholarship is “the practice of scholarship in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing process.” Social scholars may blog, share bookmarks, data and other resources, participate in social networks, make their [...]

Collaboration Tools: Scary or Revelatory?

Words like community bring out the warm fuzzies in me, until I start to think about the complexities of actually working in a community and negotiating among different perspectives. I’m wondering what scholarship might mean in an intensely collaborative and social Web 2.0 environment, so I began by trying to wikify my research project [...]