Abstract

This annotated bibliography responds to and contextualizes the growing “Open” movements and recent institutional reorientation towards social, public-facing scholarship. The aim of this document is to present a working definition of open social scholarship through the aggregation and summation of critical resources in the field. Our work surveys foundational publications, innovative research projects, and global organizations that enact the theories and practices of open social scholarship. The bibliography builds on the knowledge creation principles outlined in previous research by broadening the focus beyond traditional academic spaces and reinvigorating central, defining themes with recently published research.

Abstract

Ontology development is an emerging method in the humanities for representing research in a format that is readable and queryable by both machines and humans. Recognizing the importance of ontologies to the Semantic Web, this chapter describes how to evaluate and link to existing web vocabularies and apply them to humanities research. Events like the could potentially be added to a future iteration of the ontology as new modes of digital scholarship emerge. Literature contains the subclass Poetry, which in turn contains the subclasses Poem and Poetry Collection. The class Poem contains additional subclasses of forms. Nested hierarchical structure of classes and properties in an ontology is complemented by a collection of logical axioms that articulate relationships among properties, classes, and the things within them. Class expressions use computational primitives combined with our ontology’s defined classes and properties to create complex definitions that refine the relationships between the parts of our ontology.

Abstract

Open social scholarship highlights outreach and partnerships by emphasizing community-driven initiatives in an attempt to bridge the gap between the practices of the university and the goals of the community. Over the last few years, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria has introduced a number of initiatives to this end, including the Open Knowledge Program and Open Scholarship Awards. In describing these initiatives, the article engages the larger framework of community engagement and public-facing scholarship. The guiding questions for this article and our work more broadly are: How can we productively put open social scholarship into practice? What type of scholarship is considered public facing? What is best practice around co-creating knowledge in the humanities with communities that are academic-aligned or non-academic?

Abstract

As the scholarly landscape evolves into a more “open” plain, so do the shapes of institutions, labs, centres, and other places and spaces of research, including those of the digital humanities (DH). The continuing success of such research largely depends on a commitment to open access and open source philosophies that broaden opportunities for a more efficient, productive, and universal design and use of knowledge. The Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL; etcl.uvic.ca) is a collaborative centre for digital and open scholarly practices at the University of Victoria, Canada, that engages with these transformations in knowledge creation through its umbrella organization, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI), that coordinates and supports open social scholarship activities across three major initiatives: the ETCL itself, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI; dhsi.org), and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership, including sub-projects associated with each. Open social scholarship is the practice of creating and disseminating public-facing scholarship through accessible means. Working through C-SKI, we seek ways to engage communities more widely with publicly funded humanities scholarship, such as through research creation and dissemination, mentorship, and skills training.

Abstract

This paper introduces the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an open online space where Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders can gather to share information and resources, make connections, and build community. Situated at the intersection of the fields of digital scholarship, open access, digital humanities, and social knowledge creation, the Canadian HSS Commons is being developed as part of a research program investigating how a not-for-profit, community-partnership research commons could benefit the HSS community in Canada. This paper considers an intellectual foundation for conceptualizing the commons, its potential benefits, and its role in the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem; it explores how the Canadian HSS Commons’ open, community-based platform complements existing research infrastructure serving the Canadian HSS research community.

Part of the essay cluster "Digital Doctorates"

Abstract

This essay cluster addresses the curriculum design of graduate programs, asking how Digital Humanities projects might be integrated into them. From the perspectives of M.A. and PhD students, these essays explore the risks and rewards of integrating digital research into a traditional degree program or reshaping the degree requirements altogether. Randa El Khatib opens the cluster with an argument in favour of a digital dissertation, wherein the digital component comprises a significant part of the intellectual work of the dissertation by informing its argument either through the theoretical framework, methodology, or some other significant aspect integral to the original contribution that it makes. Reese Alexandra Irwin considers the institutional and administrative complications of integrating digital research into graduate programs, contending that that the library is the most advantageous place from which to draw support for graduate student digital projects, but that in order for the library to adequately support student projects it must be treated as a pedagogical partner by the student’s home department. Caroline Winter uses her experience digitizing Mary Shelley’s Gothic tales to explore how developing satellite digital projects that complement monograph-style doctoral dissertations is an opportunity for graduate students to develop digital skills, explore different modes of research, and experience being part of a strong community of practice. In her response, Michelle Levy weighs the risks of the various approaches to digital projects outlined in the previous essays and concludes that the institutions that house these students must offer greater support by adapting to the changing and increasingly digital landscape of humanities disciplines.

Currently in beta!

This digital library of works by and about Susan Ferrier is intended for literary scholars, students, and other readers interested in Romantic-era British literature, women’s writing, and Scottish literature and literary history.

Currently in beta!

This project uses natural language processing to explore the use of colour words in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature in English.

This digital edition presents six Gothic tales written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, all of which were published in the literary annual The Keepsake in the 1820s and 1830s. One goal of this digital edition is to make these tales available to readers in a form that mimics–as closely as the digital platform will allow–how the tales would have appeared to their first readers. To this end, the edition includes scanned digital facsimiles of each tale, scans of the frontmatter for each volume, and images of what each volume looks like.

Abstract

The Women's Research Centre (WRC) was an Alberta-based organization that promoted Women's and Feminist research, writing, education, and advocacy. The Centre's main goals were to provide a home for the growing field of interdisciplinary feminist research, as well as to serve as a gathering point and source of support for women’s groups in the community. It existed through a partnership between Athabasca University and the University of Alberta, and officially ran from 1988 to 1993. Read more about the history of the WRC here.

This records repository holds the story of the WRC and the contributions it made towards Women's Studies. The documents contained here were donated to the Thomas A. Edge Archives & Special Collections at Athabasca University by Marilyn Assheton-Smith, who was a long-standing member of the Women’s Research Centre and other academic organizations in the 1980s and 1990s. A fonds description is available here.

This repository website has been created and maintained by graduate students at the University of Alberta, whose goal it has been to make these records findable and discoverable by researchers.

Abstract

Speakers: Eleanor Stribling, Caroline Winter

Do you love literature and programming? Have you ever been curious about what the heck “Digital Humanities” are? Join us for a quick survey of what’s going on in this growing field and learn about a specific project, “Gothic Colors” where we set out to enumerate and analyze color references and mood in 19th century Gothic novels, using Python and a couple of popular libraries.

Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2017 and https://github.com/PyCon/2017-slides

A talk given at the University of Victoria's 3MT Finals in March 2016

A link to posts I've authored for the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, an initiative of the INKE Partnership.

An annotated bibliography assignment for a 300-level English course. Includes adding the resource to a shared class Zotero library.

"In Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matilda spends hours gazing at a portrait of a knight, Alfonso the Good. She explains to her maid, “[…] some how or other my destiny is linked with something relating to him. […] I am sure there is some fatal secret at bottom.” The “fatal secret” is just one of many tropes present in the novel that came to define the genre of “terror fiction” or, as it is now more commonly known, the Gothic novel. Frederick Frank argues that, as a “prototype” for the Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto “furnishes a symbolic glossary for evoking dread, for arousing pleasure in the irrational and for establishing an iconography of an unholy and malignant cosmos governed only by absurd forces.” One of these “absurd forces” is the notion of property and the laws surrounding it. Questions about what constitutes property and what it means to own it were subjects of widespread public debate throughout the eighteenth century, a debate in which Gothic literature had a powerful voice. The uncertainty surrounding the changing economy and the tensions resulting from it are manifested in the novel’s depiction of a Gothic world, an imaginative landscape dominated by a haunted castle and founded on a fatal secret. This paper examines how the novel uses the “symbolic glossary” of the Gothic to interrogate issues of property, arguing that supernatural forces at work in the novel embody economic ideas: dead hands keeping a grip on their property from beyond the grave."

Alyssa Arbuckle, Caroline Winter, Ray Siemens, Tully Barnett, 2022. "Introduction: Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 4. https://doi.org/10.54590/pop.2022.001.

"It is difficult to consider open scholarship in the early 2020s without referencing the elephant in the room: the shared global context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This strange and challenging time illuminated many cracks in global-scale infrastructure and nation-level societal priorities, and it also shone a light on the critical importance of open access to research and data. Commenting on this situation in a December 2020 article for The Conversation, Ginny Barbour, Director of Open Access Australasia, argues that “making it the default that research is open so it can be built on is a crucial step to ensure we can address [...] problems collaboratively.” But, vital as such a call is, perhaps it is not quite as easy as simply deciding to make open the default in research, or in scholarship more broadly. As Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray write in the introduction to their recent collection Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (2020), open access can be “intensely messy” (10). Further, they suggest, “open access is perceived through a set of contested institutional histories, argued over various theoretical terrains in the present, and imagined via diverse potentialities for the future” (Eve and Gray 2020, 10). Open social scholarship shares a similarly complex layering of histories, theories, and possibilities—increasingly apparent as open social scholarship grows and evolves across disciplinary and geographic divides."

Talya Jesperson, Graham Jensen, Caroline Winter, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens with the INKE Research Group, 2022. "Open, Collaborative Commons: Web3, Blockchain, and Next Steps for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 4. https://doi.org/10.54590/pop.2022.003.

Abstract: 

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This paper provides an update on the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development online hub for open social scholarship in Canada and beyond, and considers the next steps for the platform in an ever-evolving digital landscape. It outlines various recent outreach and engagement events intended to introduce the Canadian HSS Commons to the larger communities to which it belongs. Because the Canadian HSS Commons is committed to supporting the growth and evolving needs of these communities, this paper also considers how increasingly popular internet technologies such as Web3 and blockchain might play a part in the future of digital research infrastructure and the Canadian HSS Commons specifically. It concludes that while Web3 and blockchain currently raise important questions and concerns about governance, accountability, and commercialization, in the near future, these same technologies could also help engender new forms of functionality and participation on the Commons."

An annotated bibliography of resources related to open scholarship policy