Collaboration and Community in Open, Social Scholarship
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2018
Regina, Saskatchewan
Time: 10.30am-12pm, Tuesday May 29th 2018
Location: Congress Expo Space
Congress program listing: https://www.congress2018.ca/calendar/1380
Join us for short talks, demonstrations, and discussion – over coffee/tea and snacks – about academic collaboration and community in the context of open social scholarship. Growing from online practices that include open access, shared infrastructure, and citizen scholarship, open social scholarship enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways. Presenters will explore areas of public-engaged research, publishing and dissemination, resource sharing, policy activism, and knowledge mobilization. Together, we will engage the underpinnings of open scholarship, and share examples of initiatives that serve our community, including the Canadian HSS Commons, the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, Coalition Publi.ca, the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project, ORCID-CA, the Public Knowledge Project, and the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.
Discussions
- Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “The INKE Partnership and Engaging Social Knowledge”
The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership is a collaborative group of researchers and partners exploring open social scholarship and its implementation. In this presentation, I provide a brief introduction to the INKE Partnership and one of its key initiatives, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI; c-ski.ca). Originated in 2015, C-SKI is located in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab in the Digital Scholarship Commons at U Victoria. C-SKI represents, coordinates, and supports the work of the INKE Partnership through awareness raising, knowledge mobilization, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national, and international levels.
- Clare Appavoo (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), “CRKN’s Collaborative Approach to Advancing Open Social Scholarship”
CRKN actively collaborates with other organizations to advance open, social scholarship through a number of initiatives. Our recent combination with Canadiana significantly enhances our organizational commitment to this field. An update will be provided on CRKN’s merger with Canadiana and on other key collaborations with organizations including Coalition Publi.ca and ORCID-CA
- Constance Crompton (U Ottawa; Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project), “Calling All Specialists: Contributing to Wikipedia, Contributing to the Web”
This paper introduces both the best practices for open social scholarship in the context of Wikipedia and the stakes of Wikipedia editing for extended knowledge mobilization. Intended for an scholarly audience, the paper outlines the excellent outcomes of students, librarians’ and instructors’ willingness to contribute to Wikipedia, not just for the sake of human readers, but also for the machine readers, or algorithms, that shape our experience of knowledge domains online. Even in the age of information abundance, there’s a growing audience for our knowledge mobilization efforts — let’s collectively engage that audience.
- Kevin Stranack (SFU; Public Knowledge Project), “The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Two Decades”
In 2017, the Public Knowledge Project received a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to conduct a community consultation to help learn about how the Project is perceived by the broader scholarly publishing community, where we are seen as successful, and where we are seen as less so. This talk will discuss both the good and the bad, and what we are planning for the future based on these findings.
- Alyssa Arbuckle (U Victoria) , “Open Social Scholarship Initiatives”
This talk will walk through two INKE Partnership initiatives: the Canadian HSS Commons and the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory (http://ospolicyobservatory.uvic.ca/). The Canadian HSS Commons fosters an environment for Canadian humanities and social science researchers to share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly data, tools, and resources. This network adapts the concept of the extant Modern Language Association Humanities Commons platform, and builds off of HUBzero as a developmental base, working with Compute Canada and CANARIE. The Open Scholarship Policy Observatory collects research, tracks findings and national and international policy changes, and facilitates understanding of open social scholarship across Canada and internationally. This initiative reflects findings back to other partners and stakeholders, along with local institutions, associations, consortia, and government bodies, in order to assist these groups with developing timely and responsive policies. I will review these INKE Partnership initiatives and report on their status to date, as well as future directions.
- Tanja Niemann (Érudit), “Coalition-Publi.ca: Open, Social Scholarship Needs Open Scholarly Infrastructure”
The development of sustainable independent open access publishing in Canada requires an open, non-commercial infrastructure, based in the academy and controlled by the academy. Érudit is currently engaged with different Canadian stakeholders to reinforce local capacity for open scholarly infrastructure. This lightning talk aims to provide an overview and an update.
- John Simpson (Compute Canada), “Research Computing Beyond Your Desktop”
A short summary of the support for both Canadian researchers and research projects that is available from Compute Canada. This will include cloud solutions, high performance computing, and storage options.
- Kim Martin (U Guelph; Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory) & Susan Brown (U Guelph; Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory), “The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC)”
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) is part of an emerging ecology putting linked open data in the service of open scholarship within and beyond Canada. CWRC supports open scholarship not only by making content open access but also by employing standard metadata and data formats that promote discoverability, sharing, and reuse, and that are amenable to translation into linked open data. CWRC allows scholars to identify the fruits of their academic labour by providing individuals with profiles and research spaces and by enabling individual project identities, home pages, and websites containing a wide range of content. At the same time, it fosters synergies between different research initiatives within CWRC, and exposes scholarly content to broader dissemination and uptake beyond it. We will show how CWRC positions Canadian researchers to contribute to the semantic web with its burgeoning potential for open collaborative knowledge production.