THAT Camp Takeaways

My work has been so all-consuming lately that it feels like THAT Camp was months rather than a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to offer a few observations about THAT Camp before they go completely stale. Like many others, I found THAT Camp much more satisfying than the typical academic conference, since it promoted a strong sense of community (in part by using technologies such as pre-conference blogging and Twitter), was organized around the interests of participants, and encouraged the open exchange of ideas. Academic conferences typically have three functions: 1) to disseminate new ideas; 2) to bring people together to explore those ideas (and share a few beers in the process); and 3) to provide a line on the CV certifying that a scholar is actually making contributions to the research community. THAT Camp excelled at fulfilling the first two functions, and I’m hopeful that search committees and tenure committees (at least in certain communities) will see THAT Camp on a CV and think, “Wow, this person is an innovator!” Besides, the ideas generated and collaborations formed at THAT Camp will likely lead to more lines (academic merit badges?) on CVs.

I don’t have the time—and the reader probably doesn’t have the patience—to describe everything I learned at THAT Camp, but I wanted to highlight a few of the most intriguing projects or compelling ideas.

1) It’s the people, stupid.

I helped to organize a session on emerging research methods and expected that we would focus on how technologies such as visualization and text mining are opening up new approaches to scholarly inquiry. Instead, we spent most of our time engaged in a fruitful discussion about the importance—and difficulty—of collaboration, positing it as the “scholarly primitive” missing from John Unsworth’s list of core research activities. Perhaps the defining statement of the session was one person’s observation that “the cyberinfrastructure is people.” As THAT Camp itself demonstrated, collaboration enables people to develop better ideas, share the workload, sustain projects, and ultimately have a greater impact in the field, but encouraging people to share requires changes in culture and incentive systems.

2) New tools are enabling people to share annotations, resources, and work.

If collaboration is a key research process, there are some really cool tools under development that will support it. For instance, Ben Brumfield demonstrated FromThePage, a tool that allows people (historians, genealogists, history buffs) to transcribe documents, zoom in on manuscript pages, collaborate with others to identify tasks and check their work, view subjects, and more. Travis Brown is working on eComma, which “will enable groups of students, scholars, or general readers to build collaborative commentaries on a text and to search, display, and share those commentaries online.” And then there’s Zotero 2.0, which will let researchers share their collections with others.

3) Through visualization tools, researchers can make sense of a vast amount of information.

For instance, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth demonstrated ArchivesZ, which enables users of archives to visualize how much material (e.g., how many linear feet) is available in an archive related to a particular topic.

4) GIS technologies offer real analytical power, showing changes across time and space, land ownership patterns, and much more.

In a rich session on GIS tools, Josh Greenberg demonstrated how an historical map of New York could be overlaid on a contemporary Google Map, enabling one to view the development of the city. Mikel Maron discussed Open Street Map, a free and open map of the world to which people regularly contribute data. And I was delighted to learn from Shekhar Krishnan that Zotero will be releasing a mapping plug-in that will allow you to view the publication location of works in a collection on a Google Map. I had planned to create my own Google Map showing where bachelor literature was published by extracting the necessary data from Zotero, but, hooray, now I don’t have to go through the extra work. (See http://www.diigo.com/user/lspiro/GIS for more cool GIS projects).

Ways that digital resources can transform teaching and research, grand and small

While trying to determine how many articles in JSTOR and Project Muse cite Making of America (MOA), I stumbled across several articles that describe how databases such as MOA are beginning to transform humanities research. (Funny–when I look for this kind of evidence, I don’t find it, but when I’m not looking, there it is.) Most of the essays focus on how online collections enrich research by making available works that would otherwise be difficult to locate, but in one a social historian imagines large, collaborative projects in which information technology plays a crucial role.

According to Sandra Roff, researchers are discovering sources that they otherwise would not have found because they can run full-text searches on databases such as Making of America and American Periodical Series Online, 1740–1900. Describing her research into the history of the Free Academy, the precursor to the City University of New York, Roff writes:

The standard histories published before the development of the internet now prove to be incomplete since new information is easily retrieved from periodical literature using the new technology. These periodicals can provide a picture of all aspects of life during a particular time period of history, which adds a new dimension to previously static historical facts. Since there are a limited number of indexes available for the greater part of the nineteenth century, research has usually been restricted to periodical sources close to the subject locale or else to periodicals in a particular subject area. Going beyond these parameters often would yield few results and would be considerably time consuming. However, by using these databases, we discovered that news of the Free Academy was not local but had indeed spread around the country. Without the limitations of subject, author and title searching, which were the only way that historical indexes such as Poole’s or any of the indexed New York City newspapers could be searched prior to online databases, articles can now be retrieved using keyword searches. These Boolean searches can reveal mentions of subjects embedded in articles that might earlier had proven elusive even if the periodicals were searched.

Similarly, Charles La Porte argues that databases such as MOA are making it possible to study “obscure” ideas buried in Victorian periodicals:

What is new and exciting is our increasing access to formerly obscure Victorian ideas through online databases. The study of Victorian periodicals is flourishing today in part because Victorian print culture has never been more accessible, given indices like the Nineteenth Century Masterfile, and sites that reproduce Victorian journals like Chadwyck-Healey’s “Periodicals Contents Index” (PCI), the jointly-produced (and free) “Internet Library of Early Journals” (ILEJ) of the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford, and the “Making of America” (MOA) database of Cornell and the University of Michigan. The growth of these and similar resources provides us not only more access to obscure poetry, but also to the print environment of known works, and to Victorian discussions of them.

Cynthia Patterson describes online access as a “bane and boon:” she used the web extensively to locate materials for her study of Philadelphia pictorial magazine, but worried that digitization would make her own research less unique and innovative, since everyone would now have access to the same materials she had so diligently pursued:

Like most scholars, I was finding the World Wide Web an unbelievably rich source for access to networking and research. About that time, I discovered the Research Society for American Periodicals, the Making of America collection at Cornell and Michigan, and the few issues of Godey’s available online. I also discovered Periodyssey, the rare book dealer in New York City, and quietly began buying up bound volumes, first of the Union, then of Graham’s, Godey’s and Peterson’s. I also took coursework through George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. While I was fascinated with the work they were doing, digital access became a source of dread: I lived in fear that someone else would suddenly digitize the magazines in my study before I could finish my project!

To encourage students to conduct original research, teachers are promoting MOA and other databases that provide access to primary source materials. Christopher Hanlon laments the difficulty of getting students to do serious literary scholarship and explains how requiring them to use online databases such as Making of America for their research led them to produce more interesting, original work. For instance, one of his students drew on magazine articles drawn from MOA to show how the Swede in Crane’s “Blue Hotel” reflects late 19th C anxiety about Swedish immigration to the US.

By urging my students to use OCR databases to do historical research on literary texts, I was asking them to view the texts on our syllabus in Hayden White’s (1978: 81) sense of a ‘literary artifact,’ but more than that, I was urging them to take charge of their own experience of literature and hence the experience they were asking their readers to share in. Although students still don’t possess a deep sense of history, using online archives can empower students to do something we always ask of them but hardly ever equip them to accomplish: devise their own way into a text, and a way in about which we are, finally, interested.

As these comments suggest, it seems that researchers currently most value digital collections for providing enhanced access to a broader range of materials; my colleague Jane Segal and I reached a similar conclusion in our survey of humanities scholars last year. Through enhanced access, both the depth and breadth of research can be improved, as researchers uncover sources that would be otherwise difficult to discover and can quickly search a wide range of materials. Perhaps in the next five or ten years, researchers will also be saying that how they fundamentally do research and what kinds of questions they can pose have also changed, as projects such as MONK, NINES, etc. provide sophisticated tools for working with digital information and online environments for collaboration, publication, etc. (Or maybe they’re saying this already and I haven’t stumbled across those sources yet.)

In developing digital tools and methods, we should consider how they can help scholars tackle particular research challenges. Calling for historians to undertake “big,” collaborative social science research projects, Richard Steckel suggests that “large-scale archives” and “systematic information collection” can enable researchers to pursue ambitious projects, such as studying climate history, creating an international catalog of films and photographs, digitizing the notes of prominent historians, and creating a database of crime reports from 1800 to the present. He also proposes that historians digitize large collections of diaries and letters, citing MOA, Valley of the Shadow, and the Evans Early American Imprint Collection as examples of successful digitization projects. Although Steckel doesn’t use the term “digital scholarship,” he makes the case for research that requires collaboration, draws on large databases, uses computer-based tools such as GIS and statistical applications, and engages historians in producing documentaries and databases–which sure sounds like digital scholarship to me.

What qualifies as a “grand challenge” in the humanities? Such a question seems to drive initiatives to develop digital scholarship in the humanities. According to the report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, building the cyberinfrastructure is itself the humanities’ grand challenge. The AHRC e-Science Scoping Study acknowledges the difficulty of describing specific grand challenges, but points to a few possibilities: developing tools for researchers that facilitate “annotating, collating, visualising and simulating the digital content created and used within their research,” as well as “new collaborative tools and virtual collaborative environments.” Steckel’s climate history idea particularly resonates with me, freaked out as I am about climate change, but other ambitious collaborative projects spring to mind: initiatives that aim to make the humanities more global and interdisciplinary (such as Mappamundi), major GIS projects (such as Africa Map), open access data archives (such as OpenContext), etc. Given the NEH’s recently-announced high-performance computing initiative, I also wonder about the possibilities of using supercomputers to conduct complex queries across massive collections of texts, construct 3D models of cultural heritage sites, run simulations of both historical and literary events, etc.

While I’m on the subject of grand challenges and big projects, in a compelling article in the most recent Literary & Linguistic Computing, Patrick Juola argues for “Killer Applications in Digital Humanities,” which he defines as “a solution sufficiently interesting to, by itself, retrospectively justify looking [at?] the problem it solves—a Great Problem that can both empower and inspire.” Juola suggests that to make digital humanities more relevant to the broader humanities community, it should develop tools that serve “the needs of mainstream humanities scholars.” As examples of potential “killer apps,” Juola describes tools that would enable humanities scholars to automatically create back-of-the-book indices, annotate works, and discover and explore resources.

Amen. I am excited by the potential of big projects and killer apps to open up new discoveries and methods, build knowledge, serve the social good, etc. However, I hope we don’t lose sight of the contributions that small, focused projects can make as well. As an example of the mismatch between scholars’ needs and the tools developed by digital humanities folks, Juola points to an electronic scholarly edition of Clotel, which allows readers to compare passages and track changes. According to Juola, “it is not clear who among Clotel scholars will be interested in using this capacity or this edition,” and the annotation capabilities cannot be applied to other texts. But I think such a comment may reflect an all-too-common underappreciation of textual scholarship. Since Clotel exists in 4 versions, being able to compare passages is of real benefit to researchers. It’s not as if this project was created without consulting with sholars; indeed, the editor is a distinguished scholar of African-American literature. Although I certainly agree that digital humanities projects should focus on researchers’ needs (hence the significance of projects such as Bamboo, which are trying to discern those needs), I also believe that innovative methods of exploring and representing knowledge can come out experiments such as the Clotel edition. (I should acknowledge that I’m pals with some of the folks involved in developing this electronic edition.) Of course, ideally experimental tools and interfaces would be developed in as open a fashion as possible so that other projects can build on the work. As the examples I cited at the beginning of this post illustrate, big projects–text collections, databases, annotation tools, GIS maps, etc–can facilitate research into more focused topics, which in turn can contribute to our understanding of the big picture or lead us to a small but nonetheless dazzling insight.

Works Cited:

Hanlon, Christopher. “History on the Cheap: Using the Online Archive to Make Historicists out of Undergrads.” Pedagogy 5.1 (2005): 97-101. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v005/5.1hanlon.html&gt;.

Juola, Patrick. “Killer Applications in Digital Humanities.” Lit Linguist Computing 23.1 (2008): 73-83. 15 May 2008 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/1/73&gt;.

LaPorte, Charles. “Post-Romantic Ideologies and Victorian Poetic Practice, or, the Future of Criticism at the Present Time.” Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2004): 519-525. 7 May 2008 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v041/41.4laporte.html&gt;.

Patterson, Cynthia. “Access: Bane and Boon.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 17.1 (2007): 117-118. 7 May 2008 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_periodicals/v017/17.1patterson.html&gt;.

Roff, Sandra Shoiock. “From the Field: A Case Study in Using Historical Periodical Databases to Revise Previous Research.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 18.1 (2008): 96-100. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_periodicals/v018/18.1roff.html&gt;.

Steckel, Richard H. (Richard Hall). “Big Social Science History.” Social Science History 31.1 (2007): 1-34. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_science_history/v031/31.1steckel.html&gt;.

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 some strategies to promote it:

1) Develop tools that enable researchers to what they already do, but better.
Why have some disciplines, such as physics, embraced online delivery of research? As Stephen Pinfield notes in “How Do Physicists Use an E-Print Archive?,” the physics e-print archive arxiv succeeded in part because it “automated” physicists’ existing practices of exchanging pre-prints. Rather than having to go through the hassles of mailing or emailing preprints to multiple colleagues, physicists could easily post them online and, as a side benefit, make them more visible. Once researchers are convinced that a tool can help them do what they already do, only better, then they can also begin to see how it may help them to do new stuff, too. For instance, when I talk to researchers about Zotero, they first recognize its value in downloading bibliographic citations and creating bibliographies, but then begin to get excited about the possibilities of tagging and searching their collections.

2) Make social scholarship cool.
A primary lesson I learned in high school: if the cool people are doing it, pretty much everyone else will want to as well. I typically try something new (whether food, books, music, or technology) because someone I respect has recommended it. In a more scholarly context, I often evaluate the quality of a journal by checking out its editorial board. As researchers see how their colleagues are having a significant impact on research by making their work available as open access, they may be more willing to release their own research as open access. Likewise, as leading scholars come to be associated with open access journals (witness, for example, the Open Humanities Press, which has a top-notch editorial board), these publications will likely gain more legitimacy.

3) Assuage concerns about intellectual property.
Certainly not every researcher will want to blog or post pre-prints about ongoing work—someone pursuing a patent wouldn’t want to give away the goods prematurely, and if a researcher hopes to publish in a journal that doesn’t allow self-archiving, then he or she may not want to test that policy (although plenty of folks do). But researchers’ fears of being scooped or plagiarized if they post material online seem exaggerated. Indeed, posting a pre-print or a blog entry about a research breakthrough may enable a researcher to register that idea without having to wait through the long publication cycle. Sure, the Web enables plagiarizers to easily find information and copy and paste it into a document, but it also makes it easy to search for a unique phrase and catch the plagiarizers. (Witness today’s Chronicle of Higher Education article on journals experimenting with plagiarism detection tools similar to TurnItIn.) By using a Creative Commons license, researchers can make clear the terms under which their work can be used.

4) Experiment with new models for open access publication.
Even as the web makes the distribution of content easier, most academics aren’t ready to dispense with the peer review, copy editing, and in some cases the marketing functions provided by publishers, all of which cost money. So how will we pay for open access publishing? Various economic models are emerging—author fees, university or library support for publishing, etc. SCOAP3 pursues an intriguing collaborative model that has emerged from the high energy physics community, whereby a consortium supported by libraries, research societies and other groups would contract with publishers to provide their services and publish high energy physics journals as open access. To cover the approximately the United States’ approximately $4.5 million share of the total costs of publishing these journals, libraries, research societies, government agencies, etc. would re-direct funds to the SCOAP3 consortium. Rather than shifting the costs of open access publication to authors (through publication charges) or individual institutions (by moving the publication function to libraries, for instance), SCOAP3 hopes to control costs by pooling funds and to give authors and libraries (the producers, purchasers and consumers of journal content) a stronger voice in the publication process. The SCOAP3 consortium would contract with publishers to provide peer review and editorial quality control, but the publications would be open access. The publishing industry wouldn’t be closed out of this process; indeed, several publishers and scholarly societies are participating the conversations about SCOAP3. Final publications would be deposited in open access repositories, enabling data mining and scholarly re-use.

5) Make the case that social scholarship is good and good for you.
Making research openly accessible can appeal to researchers’ altruistic impulses to share their work with independent scholars and researchers whose libraries cannot afford expensive journal subscriptions, as well as to make work paid for by the public available as a public good. Yet open access also makes sense purely for self-interest. As universities increasingly measure the “impact factor” of publications, articles that other researchers can easily find, comment upon, and link to will likely carry more weight. As Michael Jensen points out, the more accessible a work is, the more visible it is and more likely it is that it will be cited. (Of course, if tenure committees don’t view electronic publications as being as scholarly as more traditional publications, then self-interest may be undermined–but scholarly organizations such as the MLA and universities such as the members of the University of California system are beginning to recognize the importance of giving proper credit to electronic publications.)

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 a culture of collaboration) is in its early stages and faces significant obstacles—economic, cultural, and technological. These challenges include:

1. Lack of awareness of social scholarship: According a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Researchers Develop Online Tools for Science Collaborations“), few scientists are aware of collaborative resources such as blogs and social networking sites. I’ve noticed this lack of awareness among faculty members from pretty much every discipline at my university. As the article points out, many people don’t use new technologies or communication methods unless they have specific needs to meet—why invest the effort in changing how you do work unless there are concrete payoffs?
2. Intellectual property concerns: Some researchers worry that if they make their work available online before publishing it with a traditional publisher they will lose control of it. For instance, a competitor may read their blog entry about ongoing research and scoop them—or even plagiarize their work. They also fear that publishers will refuse to publish a work that has already been made available online. From another perspective, copyright law also limits what material you can incorporate into your own work and share—for instance, museums and other cultural institutions seem to be levying higher fees for publication of digital images to which they hold the copyright.
   
3. Skepticism about the quality of electronic-only publications: According to research by UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, faculty in five disciplines—English, biostatistics, law and economics, anthropology, and chemical engineering–associate electronic-only publication with the lack of peer review and thus the lack of quality. If researchers don’t believe that tenure committees will give them credit for publishing in open access journals, then they will stick with more traditional means of publication.
4. Lack of recognition for social scholarship: In many disciplines, there is currently little incentive for researchers to embrace social scholarship; the incentives are with the traditional system. When I talk to faculty about social scholarship, many appreciate the vision of sharing but worry about the implementation, particularly whether tenure committees will give them credit for collaborative scholarship. What kind of rewards and recognition do you get for commenting on a colleague’s blog, publishing your articles through an institutional repository, sharing your bibliographies, or keeping an open notebook documenting your research? The UC Berkeley’s new report “Publishing Needs and Opportunities at the University of California” finds that “a significant minority” of faculty are experimenting with alternative publishing models, but that they “are increasingly frustrated by a tenure and review system that fails to recognize these new publishing models and hence constrains experimentation both in the technologies of dissemination and in the audiences addressed.”
5. Lack of time to make work available online: Contributing content to user-generated sites, reading and commenting on blogs, sharing bookmarks and doing all of the other work of social scholarship take a lot of time—time that many busy academics don’t have. In a blog post on why Web 2.0 hasn’t been adopted in the biosciences, David Crotty, executive editor of the online publication Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, details how traditional methods of doing research can often be more efficient than Web 2.0 approaches, at least initially, since you can just email a file rather than finding a collaborative site, setting up an account, uploading the file, inviting participants to view it, waiting for them to establish accounts, etc.
   
6. Cultural obstacles: Engaging in online discussions and making public thoughts that are in process are not yet part of mainstream academic culture. As David Crotty notes, many academics are unlikely to make critical comments in a public forum, since they don’t want to piss off potential reviewers, employers, or collaborators.
   
7. Need for sound economic models for open access publication: Producing academic journals isn’t free, as I learned when I served as the managing editor of Postmodern Culture—even if editors donate their time, funds are needed for copyediting, coordinating editorial review, covering travel costs for editorial meetings, paying for web hosts, etc. How will open access journals be paid for—through author fees? University, society or foundation support? What will guarantee the sustainability of these journals and provide long-term access to their content? If scholars worry about the viability and reputation of open access journals, what will entice them to publish in these journals rather than traditional publications? In Open Access Publishing and the Emerging Infrastructure for 21st-Century Scholarship, Don Waters, Program Officer for Scholarly Communications at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, expresses skepticism about the open access model: “One worry about mandates for open access publishing is that they will deprive smaller publishers of much needed subscription income, pushing them into further decline, and making it difficult for them to invest in ways to help scholars select, edit, market, evaluate, and sustain the new products of scholarship represented in digital resources and databases. The bigger worry, which is hardly recognized and much less discussed in open access circles, is that sophisticated publishers are increasingly seeing that the availability of material in open access form gives them important new business opportunities that may ultimately provide a competitive advantage by which they can restrict access, limit competition, and raise prices.”

I believe that these challenges can be overcome and will sketch some strategies for promoting social scholarship in my final posting on this thread.

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 the norm in the humanities: “Despite the demonstrated value of collaboration in the sciences, there are relatively few formal digital communities and relatively few institutional platforms for online collaboration in the humanities. In these disciplines, single-author work continues to dominate.” Recently, however, I’ve observed several trends that suggest increasing experimentation with collaborative tools and approaches in the humanities:

1) Individual commitment by scholars to open access
Recently several prominent humanities scholars have voiced strong support for open access publishing. For instance, Nick Montfort has stated that he will no longer review articles for non-open access journals. Likewise, dannah boyd has declared that she will no longer publish in journals where content is not freely available and that “scholars have a responsibility to make their work available as a public good.” As part of a forum on open access in Anthropology News, Chris Kelty articulated his reluctance to peer-review articles “for a multinational corporation with shareholders and an enormous profit margin” when he isn’t compensated for his labor. Such declarations are increasing awareness of open access and stirring up an important debate about whether it is feasible and desirable. By making publications freely available online, scholars reach a larger audience, serve the fundamental scholarly mission to advance public knowledge, and make their own work more visible. Of course, there are significant economic and cultural obstacles to open access, obstacles that I will look at in my next post.

2) Development of open access publishing outlets
The commitment to publish only in open access journals won’t go very far if there aren’t appropriate forums for this scholarship (unless authors choose to self-publish their work). Already the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 554 humanities journals, including Digital Humanities Quarterly, Transformations, African Studies Quarterly, Southern Spaces, and Bryn Mawr Classical Review Yet some open access journals struggle with the lack of resources and, perhaps more significantly, the lack of contributors. According to Sigi Jottkandt and Gary Hall, leaders of the new Open Humanities Press, the most significant obstacle “is still the general perception by our colleagues that open access publication is not as academically rigorous as traditional print-based journals and books” (http www.driver-repository.be/media/docs/OHPBrussels13-2-07.pdf). To tackle the perception that open access journals are somehow less scholarly, the Open Humanities Press emphasizes the prestige of its editorial board, which includes Stephen Greenblatt, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann, Peter Suber, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The Open Humanities Press aims to develop open access humanities journals in critical theory, construct a research gateway, and publish foundational books on critical theory that are in the public domain, taking as it main values access, scholarship, diversity and transparency. Academic and commercial publishers are likewise experimenting with open access publishing models. For instance, the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library are collaborating on the digitalculturebooks imprint, which makes digital versions of works freely available. The MIT Press is publishing Information Technologies and International Development as an open access journal and is providing free online access to the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning thanks to the support of the MacArthur Foundation. Hindawi Publishing Corporation, a commercial press focused on science and engineering, now publishes all of its journals as open access under a model where authors cover publication costs.

3) Availability of tools to support collaboration
To encourage humanities scholars to work together on complex research problems, share data and references, and jointly author documents, they need tools that make the whole process easy. Web 2.0 is a notoriously squishy term, but for me it is fundamentally about enabling participation and collaboration. We could list dozens of different collaborative tools, such as blogs, wikis, collaborative bookmarking, social networking, collaborative authoring, social tagging, visualization, mashups, etc. In the digital humanities domain, a number of tools are under development that facilitate collaboration. For example, Stan Katz hails the recent partnership between the Center for the New Media and History and the Internet Archive to enable humanities scholars to collaborate by uploading their research notes and collections to the Internet Archive using Zotero. SEASR is a software environment for data analysis that will “empower collaboration among scholars.”

4) Experiments with social peer review
While the traditional peer-review process includes only a few often anonymous reviewers, new approaches to peer review engage a larger community in evaluation and leverage collaborative bookmarking and social tagging applications to determine the impact of a work. For example, in preparing his book Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies for publication, Noah Wardruip-Fruin is pursuing two methods of peer-review: the traditional process, through MIT Press, and blog-based peer review. He’s posting the book in sections to Grand Text Auto and using CommentPress to engage in a conversation with readers. In reading over Wardruip-Fruin’s meta-reflections on blog-based peer review, I was struck by his observation that getting feedback from multiple reviewers helps him to figure out whether something just bothered one reader or is a deeper problem: “the blog-based review form not only brings in more voices (which may identify more potential issues), and not only provides some ‘review of the reviews’ (with reviewers weighing in on the issues raised by others), but is also, crucially, a conversation (my proposals for a quick fix to the discussion of one example helped unearth the breadth and seriousness of the larger issues with the section).” For Wardruip-Fruin, the “social process” produces comments that he trusts more, since they emerge from community dialogue. Some have criticized this approach, arguing that removing anonymity means that comments aren’t as honest and that opening up the review process dilutes its authority, but it seems to me that blog-based peer review resembles an online writing workshop—you hear from multiple readers and get a sense of how your argument is playing out.

5) Development of social networks to support open exchanges of knowledge
Social networking sites provide key organizational and communication tools for a community, whether it be focused around a particular field or spans the disciplines. As HASTAC’s name (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) suggests, it fosters collaboration focused on innovative, interdisciplinary uses of technology by coordinating a network of research centers, sharing information, cultivating community, overseeing funding programs such as the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition, and more. NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) is developing a platform for collaboration (Collex), a network of nineteenth-century scholars, mechanisms for peer review of digital scholarship, and training programs for scholars working on digital projects.

6) Support for collaboration by funding agencies
Funding agencies are emphasizing collaboration in many of their programs. If you look at the tag cloud for the recently-announced winners of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning competition, “collaboration” stands out as the most frequently used term, applied to projects that, for instance, “connect young African social entrepreneurs with young North American professionals,” enable young people to work together on Do It Yourself science projects, or engage high school students in Los Angeles and Cairo in an environmental studies game. Similarly, the NEH/IMLS Digital Partnership program focuses on “innovative, collaborative humanities projects,” encouraging libraries, museums, and scholars to work together to advance public knowledge.

7) More broadly, universities are emphasizing community as key part of graduate education.
The Carnegie Foundation’s The Formation of Scholars: Re-thinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century argues that graduate programs must create intellectual community to engage graduate students in the work of the department and discipline, retain them, and promote innovative thinking. Perhaps digital humanities projects exemplify the benefits of collaborative approaches to scholarship, since it’s difficult for a solo scholar to pull off the typical digital humanities project. I was motivated to complete my PhD in large part because of the communities that I participated in, particularly my dissertation group and the Electronic Text Center. It seemed that the happiest graduate students in my program were those working on digital humanities projects, which allowed us to collaborate with senior scholars and fellow graduate students, learn new skills, and do work that had immediate benefit for researchers and, often, the general public.

Other examples of social scholarship’s emergence include the growth of blogging and the use of collaborative bibliographic tools such as citeulike (which includes 500 items that are tagged “humanities“). Despite these signs that social scholarship is beginning to gain traction in the humanities, significant obstacles remain, obstacles that I will discuss in my next post.

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 works-in-progress available for review, and deposit their publications in open access repositories. A recent Scientific American article points out some of the benefits of “open source” science. At social networking sites such as OpenWetWare, which recently received a substantial NSF grant to develop social software for scientists, biologists and bioengineers share research protocols and syllabi, blog the research process, post profiles of their research groups, and find collaborators. As a result, collective wisdom is documented and passed down, failures as well as successes are made visible, lab managers can more easily track ongoing research, and researchers can get quick feedback on their work from colleagues around the world. Open Source Science seems especially appropriate for researchers searching for cures to diseases common in developing nations but of little interest to big pharmaceutical companies, since such openness can facilitate more rapid discoveries and is not constrained by the quest for patents. With Harvard’s recent adoption of an open access policy and the NIH mandate that research publications it funds be deposited in PubMed Central, social scholarship appears to be gaining momentum. To what extent are the humanities part of this movement?

Typically humanists are cast as the loners of academia, brooding over books in solitude. True, rarely do you see humanities scholars jointly authoring works, although they often collaborate to edit essay collections and journals and organize conferences and workshops. Unlike the sciences, where joint authorship is expected, many tenure committees haven’t yet figured out how to assign credit for collaborative work in the humanities. Yet you can glance at the acknowledgments in any humanities monograph and find ample evidence for the social context out of which scholarship emerges—the friends and colleagues who suggested references and read multiple drafts, the anonymous peer reviewers who provided feedback, the conference attendees and students who served as sounding boards, the assistants who offered research support, the librarians and archivists who tracked down sources, the funders who helped pay for research trips, the partners who put up with it all. Reversing the typical image of scientists as collaborators and humanists as loners, Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy Stinson point out in The Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la Rose: Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative that in the “data-poor” environments of the early modern era scientists were reluctant to share information, whereas medieval manuscripts provide ample evidence of humanists working together to write, copy, annotate, illustrate, and disseminate texts. As Choudhury and Stinson suggest, “Perhaps it is not a set of inherent characteristics within specific disciplines that defines their mode of scholarship or communication, but rather the relative ease or difficulty with which practitioners of those disciplines can generate, acquire or process data.” Does scarcity produce secrecy, abundance openness? Information housed in archives remains a scarce resource for humanities scholars, but mass digitization efforts are making other forms of humanities data widely available. Will humanities scholars work together to mine and make sense of this information? In my next posts, I’ll look at some trends indicating that humanities scholars are beginning to embrace social scholarship, as well as discuss some obstacles.

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 (morphing a dissertation on bachelors into digital scholarship). As I opened up my writing to others, I had two big fears:

1. No one will participate, so there won’t be much of an experiment in community at all. Still, I will be able to view my own revision history and gain some understanding about how going digital is changing my research. (This seems like the more likely prospect.)
2. People will participate, and I’ll lose control over my work. Do I really want people rewriting my research project? Will the ideas still be mine? What if vandals rampage my writing?

I decided that a system that allows comments rather than complete re-writing was more appropriate, so I decided to use the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Comment Press application, an add-on to the Word Press blogging platform.  Several other collaborative authoring project are using Comment Press, including The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age with HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 by McKenzie Wark, and The Iraq Study Group Report with Lapham’s Quarterly.