Open Scholarship Awards 2019
Sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute and its partners
Open Scholarship Award (2019), for open scholarship carried out by scholars, librarians, citizen scholars, research professionals, and administrators.
- Award: Catherine Ryu (Michigan State U)
- Honourable Mentions:
- Dene Grigar (Washington State U, Vancouver)
- Michael E. Sinatra (U Montréal) and Marcello Vitali-Rosati (U Montréal)
- John Barber (Washington State U, Vancouver)
Emerging Open Scholarship Award (2019), for open scholarship carried out by undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early stage professionals.
- Award: Stephan Risi (Stanford U)
- Honourable Mentions:
- Ashley Cheyemi McNeil (Georgia State U)
- Monica Granados (Environment and Climate Change Canada)
- Jane Wong (Western Washington U)
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 recipient to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI; dhsi.org).
The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute would like to thank Alyssa Arbuckle (ETCL, U Victoria), Donna Bourne-Tyson (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Susan Brown (U Guelph), Jason Ensor (Western Sydney U), Brian Owen (Simon Fraser U Library), Gabriel Miller (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), Tanja Niemann (Érudit), Jon Saklofske (Acadia U), Ray Siemens (U Victoria), and Dan Sondheim (ETCL, U Victoria) for their involvement in the 2019 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 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, U Victoria Libraries, and Voyant Tools, among others.
Catherine Ryu (Michigan State U), 2019 Open Scholarship Award Winner
Tone Perfect
https://toneperfect.lib.msu.edu/
Tone Perfect, a multimodal Mandarin Chinese Database, is an interactive web-based language learning and research resource, which was launched in fall 2017. Ryu developed this database in collaboration with Michigan State University’s digital humanities librarian team. The main goal of this database is to support self-guided tone perception training for Mandarin Chinese learners (including all age groups), receiving either formal or informal instruction. Moreover, this database, with an option to download its audio assets directly from the website, can serve as a useful resource for teachers and researchers to design lessons with samples of multiple native speakers. Tone Perfect also supports empirical research projects that would require monosyllabic stimuli with natural voices. In sum, the Tone Perfect project team has developed this database as an accessible space for optimal inclusive learning. The next phase of this project, currently under development, is to make the web-based interface of Tone Perfect accessibility compliant. To enhance the visibility of the database and get wide use of this unique resource, Ryu has presented Tone Perfect at various conferences (including at Digital Humanities 2018 conferences in Mexico City) and offered hands-on workshops on how to utilize Tone Perfect in multiple and effective ways (http://www.education.msu.edu/cimsu/conference/workshop-for-teachers.asp).
Stephen Risi (Stanford U), 2019 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Winner
Tobacco Analytics
http://tobacco-analytics.org/
Tobacco Analytics is a text analysis platform that allows researchers to analyze 11 million formerly secret tobacco industry documents through interactive visualizations, topic modeling, and new methods of search and discovery. As a research tool, Tobacco Analytics helps amplify efforts to use big data to fight Big Tobacco by helping scholars in public health, medicine, law, and history search through and visualize trends in millions of legal documents. While the tobacco industry has traditionally tried to overwhelm public health advocates with massive data dumps right before a hearing or court proceeding, Tobacco Analytics allows researchers to quickly visualize and summarize the contents of all publicly available tobacco documents and explore the changing history of key tobacco concepts over time. This tool can support innovative work on individual documents by furnishing researchers with a 30,000-foot-view on the documents, which allows them to quickly test hypotheses and formulate new arguments. The resulting visual summaries can help refute claims made by tobacco industry lawyers that smokers always knew about the harms inherent in smoking, which are often based on a selective reading of a few non-representative documents.
Dene Grigar (Washington State U, Vancouver), 2019 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media
http://scalar.usc.edu/works/rebooting-electronic-literature/index
Rebooting Electronic Literature is an open-source, multimedia book that documents seven pre-web works of electronic literature held in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) library at Washington State University Vancouver. The seven works selected for this project are among the most unique and fragile. Sarah Smith’s King of Space (1991), the first documented e-lit work of science fiction, was produced with the early hypertext authoring Hypergate. David Kolb’s Socrates in the Labyrinth (1994) is one of a handful of hypertext essays produced during the pre-web period and certainly the only one focusing on philosophy. J Yellowlees Douglas’s “I Have Said Nothing” (1994), which appeared in W. W. Norton & Co.’s Postmodern American Fiction (1997) as one of only two works of electronic literature ever published in one of Norton’s many collections. Thomas M. Disch’s AMNESIA (1986) is a text adventure game, the only published by Electronic Arts and one of a handful authored by a prominent print writer. Rob Kendall’s A Life Set for Two (1996) is an animated poem programmed by the artist in Visual Basic. Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope, Version 3.0 (1993) is a retooling of Version 2.0 (1990) by Mark Bernstein from the original BASIC program into the Storyspace aesthetic. Finally, Mary-Kim Arnold’s “Lust” (1994) packaged with Douglas in The Eastgate Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Number 2 is a hypertext that straddles the genre of fiction and poetry.
Michael E. Sinatra (U Montréal) and Marcello Vitali-Rosati (U Montréal), 2019 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Parcours numériques
https://www.parcoursnumeriques-pum.ca
Parcours numériques (PN) is an open publishing platform launched in 2014 that focuses on supporting digital scholarship in French. The platform, which is supported by Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, allows hybrid print/web works to be published where there is a print and e-reader version of a work that is linear and accessible. This is complemented by an enhanced scholarly version mirrored on the PN site that is non-linear and includes multimedia components and expanded critical apparatus. This platform thus provides authors and readers a combination of ways of authoring and reading. An author can both emphasize a linear thread through their scholarship in the print version and expand that in a hypermedia, non-linear fashion in the online version. Likewise the reader can create their own text or digital path through the enhanced content.
John Barber (Washington State U, Vancouver), 2019 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
American Dust
www.brautigan.net
American Dust is an online, comprehensive scholarly resource about Richard Brautigan’s life and writing, freely available under open access and Fair Use guidelines. The purpose is to make this information more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by sharing it broadly and publicly with other scholars, researchers, readers, and fans. American Dust is registered with OCLC WorldCat (#1054104600) and has its own DOI (doi.org/10.7273/nvgh-ca61). Richard Gary Brautigan (1935-1984) was an American writer popular during the 1960s-1970s. His writing characterized the cultural electricity in San Francisco, California, during the ebbing of the Beat Generation and the emergence of the counterculture movement. Brautigan’s bibliography includes ten novels, ten poetry collections, and one collection of short stories, as well as four volumes of collected work, nonfiction writing, and a spoken voice record album. Defining works include his novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967), his collection of poetry, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), and his collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn (1971). Access to wide-ranging information about Brautigan’s life and writing is difficult as criticism, studies, and other responses are disparate and often ephemeral. American Dust collects, curates, and contextualizes this information in an online, web-based repository, making it accessible to scholars, researchers, readers, and fans. Publication, background, and other information for each of Brautigan’s works is provided. Citations and annotated reviews, many with full text, are available. A chronology for each decade of Brautigan’s life provides context for his writing.
Ashley Cheyemi McNeil (Georgia State U), 2019 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
ATLMaps
https://atlmaps.org/
The ATLMaps platform, a collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about Atlanta. While currently focused on one city to demonstrate the power of stacking thousands of layers of information on one place, this innovative online platform will eventually allow users to layer an increasing number of interdisciplinary data to address the complex issues that any city poses. The project looks to offer a framework that incorporates storytelling reliant on geospatial data and for normalizing input across a range of data sets about so that material can be cross-compared in novel ways, allowing users to make connections between seemingly unrelated data sources and ask questions that would not be apparent when only looking at one particular project. The ATLMaps project will also encourage knowledgeable members of the university and local communities to curate data on the site to demonstrate the possibilities for synthesizing material across projects and data types.
Monica Granados (Environment and Climate Change Canada), 2019 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
PREreview
https://prereview.org/
PREreview seeks to diversify peer review in the academic community by crowdsourcing pre-publication feedback to improve the quality of published scientific output, and to train early-career researchers (ECRs) in how to review others’ scientific work. We want to facilitate a cultural shift in which every scientist Posts, Reads, and Engages with preprints as standard practice in scholarly publishing. Journal clubs are a staple in academia: they facilitate scientists’ collective engagement with others’ discoveries, and provide ECRs with a forum to learn how to critically evaluate research. However, the results of those discussions rarely leave the meeting rooms, and with no mechanism to integrate feedback, they do not contribute to improving published scientific articles. PREreview was born as a platform to facilitate the collaborative writing of preprint reviews produced from discussions at journal clubs. We see PREreview as a hub to support and nurture the growth of a community that openly exchanges timely, constructive feedback on emerging scientific outputs. We believe that by empowering ECRs through peer review training programs, thereby increasing the diversity of researchers involved in the peer review process, PREreview will help establish a healthier and more sustainable culture around research dissemination and evaluation.
Jane Wong (Western Washington U), 2019 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Poetics of Haunting
www.poeticsofhaunting.com
The Poetics of Haunting project considers how social, historical, and political contexts haunt the work of contemporary Asian American poets. How does history—particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization—impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? A poetics of haunting insists on invocation: a deliberate, powerful, and provocative move toward haunted places. Focused on public scholarship and engagement, this digital archive features audio and video conversations, poetry, photographs, and multimodal ephemera. The site also features Wong’s TEDx talk about the project.