If we are looking for ways to measure success, I think we need to emphasize the larger health of the culture as a whole. Susan rightly points to places where measurements are possible, such as open access, diversity of digital content, and linkages established and maintained in the community.
I think the note we may want to strike is one of enrichment. I believe that education and research share a common goal of enriching the lives of people. Economic measures can overlap in places with this larger agenda, but are widely used only because they are simpler, not because they carry more meaning or usefulness. "Enrichment" suggests economics without directly invoking it.
Alternative terms that have been used, particularly for research and education in the arts and humanities, include "ennobling" and "uplifting." I hesitate about these because they are metaphors with significant defining others. If there is a nobility then there are peasants. If there are uplifted people then there are people who are not uplifted. But if a culture is enriched then there is a benefit to everyone and not just to selected people.
Monday, September 20, 2010
HQP
I think one of the issues we should address is the education of humanities scholars in general and in particular of scholars in humanities computing and the digital humanities.
Willard McCarty distinguishes between researchers in humanities computing, who are involved in experimenting with tools and methods, and researchers in the digital humanities--a potentially much larger group who are using the tools and methods from the first group and applying them to their own scholarly activities.
For the purposes of creating highly qualified personnel who can help sustain digital scholarship, I believe we need plans for the education of all three groups. Note that I use the word "education" rather than "training."
Willard McCarty distinguishes between researchers in humanities computing, who are involved in experimenting with tools and methods, and researchers in the digital humanities--a potentially much larger group who are using the tools and methods from the first group and applying them to their own scholarly activities.
For the purposes of creating highly qualified personnel who can help sustain digital scholarship, I believe we need plans for the education of all three groups. Note that I use the word "education" rather than "training."
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Libraries one answer to sustainability challenges?
At NINES-sponsored meeting about collaborating across federated sites, sustainability has emerged early on as a major concern even from groups that are just getting going, as they find that some of their scholarly projects, once the initial funding runs out, are being forced to shift from open access to paid models in order to keep going.
People have also been talking about the high overhead (not just in terms of equipment, utilities, and space but also of drafting MOUs etc.) of hosting other projects. Institutional libraries are being characterized here as the best long-term hosting options for digital projects.
Certainly universities libraries are where a lot of long-running digital scholarship (e.g. Perseus, Brown) is hosted and are moving, and it seems a natural extension of the academic library's role as curator of academic publications.
What are the advantages of library hosting of academic projects, on both sides? What are the disadvantages? Does it work best for projects that are essentially done and need to be archived? How well does it work for projects that are still in devlopment?
People have also been talking about the high overhead (not just in terms of equipment, utilities, and space but also of drafting MOUs etc.) of hosting other projects. Institutional libraries are being characterized here as the best long-term hosting options for digital projects.
Certainly universities libraries are where a lot of long-running digital scholarship (e.g. Perseus, Brown) is hosted and are moving, and it seems a natural extension of the academic library's role as curator of academic publications.
What are the advantages of library hosting of academic projects, on both sides? What are the disadvantages? Does it work best for projects that are essentially done and need to be archived? How well does it work for projects that are still in devlopment?
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Perils of scholarly publishing
The future of scholarly publishing has been debated extensively for years. There's no question that there is a crisis and that it's been building for complex reasons for decades now. The digital turn is a part, but not all, of the story.
The question of how to manage and finance the dissemination of scholarly work is a large one. The Open Access movement--here is one influential articulation of open access--argues that free availability of the results of scholarly inquiry is both an intellectual and a social good.
In societies such as Canada, where the cost of scholarly research is very largely borne by public funds, open access is increasingly perceived as a public right, for instance by Michael Geist. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for instance, has in principle an open access policy. Yet there are no teeth to it, because the implementation proved contentious.
Notwithstanding the observation that a very basic open-access requirement would not be hard to put in place at SSHRC, such a policy still begs the question of how universal open access scholarly publication could be achieved and sustained over the long haul, for we have yet to figure out precisely who is going to bear the considerable costs of keeping scholarly publishing going under this new model. There are of course institutional repositories, and Canadian universities libraries are really stepping up to the plate in this area, but my own sense is that right now, at least, IRs are working best as a supplement to more conventional modes of scholarly publication, and are not likely to replace them any time soon.
And in the meantime, university presses, which have for so long been the backbone of scholarly dissemination and credit in the humanities, are struggling to figure out new economic models.
What will be the future of the scholarly monograph? The University of Michigan Press announced last year that it would shift almost entirely to publishing digitally or through print-on-demand: "digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience." And yet that move seems not to have helped Rice University Press,which having failed at the traditional model in the mid-90s, was reborn as an all-digital imprint a few years ago, and is now being shut down again. This is not necessarily because there is no future in digital publishing, as a former board member argues, but it does seem more than a little ironic that this comes right on the heels of the press's impressive publication, only a few months after the event, of the Shape of Things to Come deliberations on online scholarship, many of which focused on challenges of sustainability. The speed of publication of a collection of essays on a timely topic seemed to embody the promise of a digital press. The Rotunda experiment at the University of Virginia Press is an impressive one, but when one looks at the list of universities that subscribe to its rather pricey online edition and collections, it's nowhere near as long as would be the list of purchasers of major, top-quality print editions of the kind that Rotunda makes available digitally. And there isn't of course just one mode of publishing digitally, and a press that is willing to work with authors to produce innovative online editions will have a higher overhead than one that is using a more standardized approach.
Things are looking better for open-access journals, and Canada's own Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems can take a large share of credit for helping many journals around the world migrate to digital form or start up in digital form. But someone still has to sustain the hardware and the server software on which these journals run, and figure out how to migrate them as systems and standards change. SSHRC's new program to support open-access journals looks like a great step in the direction of figuring out new means of sustaining these new modes of publication. But how does this program look to editors of scholarly journals? Will it be able to sustain the costs of digital publication? And could something similar be imagined for open-source monographs, especially with innovative models of peer review And what digital scholarly productions that aren't fish or fowl but some other kind of beast than those forms that emerged from print culture? How can they be sustained? And what about literary publishing, a whole other kettle of worms?
The question of how to manage and finance the dissemination of scholarly work is a large one. The Open Access movement--here is one influential articulation of open access--argues that free availability of the results of scholarly inquiry is both an intellectual and a social good.
In societies such as Canada, where the cost of scholarly research is very largely borne by public funds, open access is increasingly perceived as a public right, for instance by Michael Geist. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for instance, has in principle an open access policy. Yet there are no teeth to it, because the implementation proved contentious.
Notwithstanding the observation that a very basic open-access requirement would not be hard to put in place at SSHRC, such a policy still begs the question of how universal open access scholarly publication could be achieved and sustained over the long haul, for we have yet to figure out precisely who is going to bear the considerable costs of keeping scholarly publishing going under this new model. There are of course institutional repositories, and Canadian universities libraries are really stepping up to the plate in this area, but my own sense is that right now, at least, IRs are working best as a supplement to more conventional modes of scholarly publication, and are not likely to replace them any time soon.
And in the meantime, university presses, which have for so long been the backbone of scholarly dissemination and credit in the humanities, are struggling to figure out new economic models.
What will be the future of the scholarly monograph? The University of Michigan Press announced last year that it would shift almost entirely to publishing digitally or through print-on-demand: "digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience." And yet that move seems not to have helped Rice University Press,which having failed at the traditional model in the mid-90s, was reborn as an all-digital imprint a few years ago, and is now being shut down again. This is not necessarily because there is no future in digital publishing, as a former board member argues, but it does seem more than a little ironic that this comes right on the heels of the press's impressive publication, only a few months after the event, of the Shape of Things to Come deliberations on online scholarship, many of which focused on challenges of sustainability. The speed of publication of a collection of essays on a timely topic seemed to embody the promise of a digital press. The Rotunda experiment at the University of Virginia Press is an impressive one, but when one looks at the list of universities that subscribe to its rather pricey online edition and collections, it's nowhere near as long as would be the list of purchasers of major, top-quality print editions of the kind that Rotunda makes available digitally. And there isn't of course just one mode of publishing digitally, and a press that is willing to work with authors to produce innovative online editions will have a higher overhead than one that is using a more standardized approach.
Things are looking better for open-access journals, and Canada's own Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems can take a large share of credit for helping many journals around the world migrate to digital form or start up in digital form. But someone still has to sustain the hardware and the server software on which these journals run, and figure out how to migrate them as systems and standards change. SSHRC's new program to support open-access journals looks like a great step in the direction of figuring out new means of sustaining these new modes of publication. But how does this program look to editors of scholarly journals? Will it be able to sustain the costs of digital publication? And could something similar be imagined for open-source monographs, especially with innovative models of peer review And what digital scholarly productions that aren't fish or fowl but some other kind of beast than those forms that emerged from print culture? How can they be sustained? And what about literary publishing, a whole other kettle of worms?
Monday, August 16, 2010
The Start of the Literature Review
The first part of the project involves a literature review. Our open access bibliography and literature review is intended to promote informed public debate on matters of sustainability in the digital cultural and scholarly sectors.
Drawing on previous work, including national and international research and white papers, we will consider what existing and emergent strategies, initiatives, funding structures, policies, and partnerships would be most suitable for sustaining digital scholarship and cultural heritage materials. We will assess the role that humanities scholarship has played in fostering digital content creation in and beyond Canada, the strengths and weaknesses of the various models used to date, and the potential of current and emergent models for fostering diversity of digital content. We will review the literature on the spin-off impacts of digital scholarship for cultural activities in a sector that employs 1.1 million people. Finally, we will consider what kinds of infrastructure investment are needed to sustain digital humanities scholarship in such a way that it can strengthen its role in promoting the arts in Canada, using emergent technologies.
By reading this post, you are a part of this process.
We want you to read, comment upon and suggest some of the literature that we uncover over the course of the next few months.
Here are some of the places that we are using as a springboard for our literature review:
The Methods Network
The UK's e-Science initiative is of primary strategic importance. It is aimed at developing new methodologies for research, and also providing a cohesive framework to support existing, advanced methods, as grid technologies are changing the way that researchers use, study and exchange arts and humanities data.
Our Cultural Commonwealth
"Our Cultural Commonwealth" is the report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Artmob
Artmob is a multisectoral initiative designed to build large, accessible online archives of publically licensed Canadian art, and to foreground the issues that this process raises for Canadian copyright and intellectual property laws.
Synergies Canada
A not-for-profit platform for the publication and the dissemination of research results in social sciences and humanities published in Canada.
Canadiana.org
It is vital to have a Canadian vision to present our cultural and scientific heritage in its bilingual and multicultural variety to our citizens and to the world, and to develop a comprehensive plan to provide Canadian Society with enduring digital access to that heritage. This is the mission of Canadiana.org.
Library and Archives Canada
LAC mission is to build Canada's cultural memory through their collections, then interpret those collections through programs, events and exhibitions. Further, they provide access to Canada's documentary heritage, preserving it for the future. This documentary heritage includes published works, archival records, sound and AV materials, photos, artwork and electronic publications. Finally, LAC manages Canada's knowledge resources through its work with other archives, libraries and individual users through both electronic and traditional media.
The Canadian Heritage Information Network
The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) allows Canadian museums to engage their audiences through the use of innovative technologies.
SSHRC - The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Publications Archive
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is the federal agency that promotes and supports university-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences. Through its programs and policies, SSHRC enables the highest levels of research excellence in Canada, and facilitates knowledge-sharing and collaboration across research disciplines, universities and all sectors of society.
Drawing on previous work, including national and international research and white papers, we will consider what existing and emergent strategies, initiatives, funding structures, policies, and partnerships would be most suitable for sustaining digital scholarship and cultural heritage materials. We will assess the role that humanities scholarship has played in fostering digital content creation in and beyond Canada, the strengths and weaknesses of the various models used to date, and the potential of current and emergent models for fostering diversity of digital content. We will review the literature on the spin-off impacts of digital scholarship for cultural activities in a sector that employs 1.1 million people. Finally, we will consider what kinds of infrastructure investment are needed to sustain digital humanities scholarship in such a way that it can strengthen its role in promoting the arts in Canada, using emergent technologies.
By reading this post, you are a part of this process.
We want you to read, comment upon and suggest some of the literature that we uncover over the course of the next few months.
Here are some of the places that we are using as a springboard for our literature review:
The Methods Network
The UK's e-Science initiative is of primary strategic importance. It is aimed at developing new methodologies for research, and also providing a cohesive framework to support existing, advanced methods, as grid technologies are changing the way that researchers use, study and exchange arts and humanities data.
Our Cultural Commonwealth
"Our Cultural Commonwealth" is the report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Artmob
Artmob is a multisectoral initiative designed to build large, accessible online archives of publically licensed Canadian art, and to foreground the issues that this process raises for Canadian copyright and intellectual property laws.
Synergies Canada
A not-for-profit platform for the publication and the dissemination of research results in social sciences and humanities published in Canada.
Canadiana.org
It is vital to have a Canadian vision to present our cultural and scientific heritage in its bilingual and multicultural variety to our citizens and to the world, and to develop a comprehensive plan to provide Canadian Society with enduring digital access to that heritage. This is the mission of Canadiana.org.
Library and Archives Canada
LAC mission is to build Canada's cultural memory through their collections, then interpret those collections through programs, events and exhibitions. Further, they provide access to Canada's documentary heritage, preserving it for the future. This documentary heritage includes published works, archival records, sound and AV materials, photos, artwork and electronic publications. Finally, LAC manages Canada's knowledge resources through its work with other archives, libraries and individual users through both electronic and traditional media.
The Canadian Heritage Information Network
The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) allows Canadian museums to engage their audiences through the use of innovative technologies.
SSHRC - The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Publications Archive
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is the federal agency that promotes and supports university-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences. Through its programs and policies, SSHRC enables the highest levels of research excellence in Canada, and facilitates knowledge-sharing and collaboration across research disciplines, universities and all sectors of society.
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