Sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute and its partners
Open Scholarship Award (2018), for open scholarship carried out by scholars, librarians, citizen scholars, research professionals, and administrators.
Award:
- Juan Alperin (Simon Fraser U)
Honorable Mentions:
- Dene Grigar (Washington State U) and Stuart Moulthrop (U Wisconsin Milwaukee)
- Gantulga Lkhagva (Mongolian Libraries Consortium)
- Ernesto Priego (City U London) and Peter Wilkins (Douglas C)
Emerging Open Scholarship Award (2018), for open scholarship carried out by undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early stage professionals.
Award:
- Erin Rose Glass (UC San Diego Library)
Honorable Mentions:
- Avery Dame-Griff (Winona State U)
- Luis Meneses (U Victoria)
- Patrick Smyth (CUNY Graduate Center)
Open scholarship incorporates open access, open data, open education, and other related movements that have the potential to make scholarly work more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by those within and beyond the academy. By engaging with open practices for academic work, open scholarship shares that work more broadly and more publicly.
Nature of the Awards
Award recipients demonstrate exemplary open scholarship via research, projects, or initiatives. These awards are intended to acknowledge and celebrate exemplary open scholarship, nominated via an open process. In addition to the recognition of accomplishment that comes with such acknowledgement, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute will also offer one tuition scholarship for each award recipient to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI; dhsi.org).
The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute would like to thank Clare Apavoo (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), Alyssa Arbuckle (ETCL, U Victoria), Jon Bath (U Saskatchewan), Jonathan Bengtson (U Victoria), Rachel Hendry (Western Sydney U), Tanja Niemann (Érudit), Peter Severinson (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), Ray Siemens (U Victoria), and Dan Sondheim (ETCL, U Victoria) for their involvement in the 2018 awards.
About the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute
The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) actively engages issues related to networked open social scholarship: creating and disseminating research and research technologies in ways that are accessible and significant to a broad audience that includes specialists and active non-specialists. Representing, coordinating, and supporting the work of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, C-SKI activities include awareness raising, knowledge mobilization, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national, and international levels. Originated in 2015, C-SKI is located in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab in the U Victoria Digital Scholarship Commons.
C-SKI’s partners, through INKE, include: Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing (CISP), Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), Compute Canada, Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), Canadiana, Digital Humanities Research Group (DHRG; Western Sydney U), Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), Edith Cowan U, Érudit, Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Iter: Gateway to the Renaissance, J.E. Halliwell Associates, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Simon Fraser U Library, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Scholarly and Research Communication (SRC), U Victoria Libraries, and Voyant Tools, among others.
Juan Alperin (Simon Fraser U)
Public Access to Scholarship and Research
- Alperin’s initiatives include his directorship of the Scholcomm Lab (Simon Fraser U, partners at U Ottawa and U Montreal), and research leadership of Understanding Societal Impact of Research through Social Media (PI; SSHRC Insight Grant), which to develop new methodologies for studying how both scholars and non-scholars share scholarly research through social media, Assessing the Value of Openness in Faculty Review and Promotion (PI; Open Society Foundation), which seeks to address the incentives for Open-Access publishing by looking at Tenure and Promotion guidelines from departments across North America, and Sustaining Open Access’ Most Widely Used Publishing Software (PI; Arnold Foundation Planning Grant), which seeks to develop long-term sustainability planning for the Public Knowledge Project(PKP), an essential piece of open scholarly infrastructure. Alperin has a decade of service to the PKP team, initially as a software developer and currently as the Project’s Associate Director of Research, and is a member of the team for Open Science: Social Science & Humanities Cyberinfrastructure (Co-applicant with PI Vincent Lariviere, CFI Cyberinfrastructure).
Erin Rose Glass (UC San Diego Library / CUNY Graduate Center)
#SocialDiss
http://www.erinroseglass.com/socialdiss/ | https://www.hastac.org/blogs/erin-glass/2017/03/24/announcing-socialdiss-transforming-dissertation-networked-knowledge
- Digital Humanities Coordinator in the UCSD Library, Glass’ #SocialDiss is a social academic experiment that involves the posting of a chapter of Glass’ doctoral dissertation to a different commenting platform in solicitation of public peer review. This social academic experiment, inspired by the participatory values of the HASTAC network and proud heir of the minor tradition of experimental humanities dissertations, is an extension of Glass’ work in student-directed writing technology. It is also tightly-linked to the topic of the dissertation itself. “Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline” explores the historical development of the university’s reproductive role in our everyday software environment, as seen from the unlikely site of the humanities; the dissertation attempts to draw connections between academic ideology, especially as it relates to writing, and the political situation of digital technology today. The objective of the dissertation is not merely to critique, but to point to the university’s promising role in digital emancipation, and enact a humble step in that direction.
Avery Dame-Griff (Winona State U)
Transgender Usenet Archive (TUA)
http://averydame.net/?page_id=506
- Dame-Griff’s Transgender Usenet Archive is a public archive of posts from targeted Usenet newsgroups which grew in popularity during the 1990’s upswing in online discussion forums, groups central to the development of a transgender community. From the earliest days of Fidonet, trans individuals have made spaces for discussion and resource-sharing online. Some of these spaces were hosted on Usenet, a decentralized, worldwide discussion system founded in 1980 and organized around topic-specific newsgroups and an influential predecessor to modern social media platforms. These spaces offered transgender users the opportunity to communicate and find support, without falling into “maladaptive” coping strategies. The TUA offers researchers and other interested parties access to a robust collection of early online transgender discourse. The TUA holds nearly 400,000 posts from five transgender-themed Usenet newsgroups: alt.transgendered, soc.support.transgendered, alt.support.srs, alt.support.crossdressing, and alt.fashion.crossdressing. By combining data from multiple newsgroups into one dataset, users can examine message content and posting habits within the transgender counterpublic on Usenet.
Dene Grigar (Washington State U) and Stuart Moulthrop (U Wisconsin Milwaukee)
Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature
http://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders
- Grigar and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature is an open-source, multimedia book that documents four early works of digital literature, specifically pre-web hypertext fiction and poetry, from 1986-1995: [1] Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, programmed in BASIC as a serial novel and published on the net from 1986-1987 and sold from 1987-1988 in various versions on 5 ¼ floppy disks through Art Com Catalog; published in 1995 on the web; [2] John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, a hypermedia novel created in Hypercard 2.0 and published in 1993 by Eastgate System, Inc. as a box containing artifacts from the literary estate of the titular Uncle Buddy; [3] Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, produced on Eastgate’s Storyspace platform and published by the company in 1995 and regarded by critics as an important work of hypertext and cyberfeminism; and [4] Bill Bly’s We Descend, a complex hypertext archive––also created on Eastgate’s Storyspace platform for both floppy disks and CDs––that experiments with the layering of time and published by the company in 1997. Among the first computer-based works of literature to be sold commercially, because of their availability they have been influential in shaping literary theory and criticism that, today, are used to discuss born digital writing. They are also literary works in danger of becoming inaccessible to the public because they were produced on and for computer platforms that today are obsolete. At its core, Pathfinders is an open preservation project that makes early works of digital literature widely available to scholars and others for the purpose of study.
Gantulga Lkhagva (Mongolian Libraries Consortium)
Leadership in National Open Access Initiatives
- Chair of the Mongolian Libraries Consortium, Lkhagva’s origins in open access initiatives date to the 2003 meeting of the Academies of Sciences: Open Access as a Means Promote Academic Publishing (Budapest, Hungary), and his subsequent appointment as country coordinator of OA and Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Mongolia. This was career change, toward supporting higher educational institutions, research organizations and professional societies to move to online distribution of scholarly journals and other professional materials by establishing OA tools and repositories on a national level. Strengthening the research potential of scholarship in this way, he urged, made optimal use of his nation’s investment in research activities. Today, the consortium leads OA dissemination, advocacy and capacity building with national and international stakeholders. Current initiatives, such as with the MongoliaJOL: Mongolia Journals OnLine (https://www.mongoliajol.info) project, promote and support publishing standards’ awareness and use across all Mongolian-published OA peer-reviewed journals and support and improve Mongolia citizen’s science literacy via providing access to those materials and others beyond.
Luis Meneses (U Victoria)
Social Media Engine
https://co-shs.ca/en/research/discovery/social-media-engine-en/
- Meneses’ work is predicated on the premise that the increase of social media use has potential to transform scholarly communication. The Social Media Engine operates in the framework of OA repositories, aiming to instigate public engagement, open social scholarship and social knowledge creation by matching readers with publications. The framework relies on the gathering and analysis of corpora harvested, indexed, and rendered through Open Access and academic materials from Érudit (https://www.erudit.org) and the Public Knowledge Project (https://pkp.sfu.ca). First, the framework yields a list of topics related to individual entries and articles in the corpus by applying textual analysis techniques and topic modeling. Second, the engine connects readers and publications by monitoring social media for trending topics and returning links to open access publications that can be used to feed and enrich the discussion. Finally, the engine identifies trending papers on social media by looking at the number of times that papers on social science topics are shared, saved, liked, or commented on. In this framework, academic publications gain additional features that afford them to promote public engagement and open scholarship. The project also highlights that a significant current and future challenge lies in investigating the implications that these features and affordances will ultimately introduce.
Ernesto Priego (City U London) and Peter Wilkins (Douglas C)
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship
- Priego and Wilkins’ Comics Grid is a pioneering open access, open peer review academic journal dedicated to comics scholarship, promoting the area within academia and the general public via contributions that present specialised knowledge in an accessible language, publishing content licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license. As a publishing platform The Comics Grid encourages digital research, public engagement and collaboration. By integrating with ORCID, and requesting that supplementary data is deposited in open access repositories, The Comics Grid introduces a new generation of scholars to open, reproducible research. It uses Ubiquity Press and the Open Library of Humanities as their publishers; working closely with their web developer and designer, Andy Byers, the journal employs Open Journal Systems with an overlay skin that offers an accessible (and dyslexia friendly) reading mode and a visual UI at both front- and back-end that improves the basic OJS and turns it into a user-friendlier platform that supports general and specialised readers as much as academic authors, editors and reviewers.
Patrick Smyth (CUNY Graduate Center)
The NEH Impact Index
- Smyth’s National Endowment for the Humanities Impact Index makes visible the impact of the NEH on local communities and cultural institutions. It uses open data provided by the NEH in conjunction with geolocal information from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Index organizes this data by time and space and categorizes projects visually in critical areas such as preservation and access, public programs, and education. Visitors enter a zip code and search radius to find projects funded by the NEH in that region. Projects are color-coded by category to show their impact in areas such as education, preservation, and public programs – critical for large cities and institutions and local communities alike. It uses free and open technology and open data to support an ideal currently under threat: the public humanities. The Index has received attention from PC Magazine and Phi Beta Kappa, and Smyth has since collaborated with the National Humanities Alliance in their work to make sure work in the public humanities continues to receive support in the US.