Sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute and its partners
For 2021, we are pleased to be able to award 2 Open Scholarship Awards and 2 Emerging Open Scholarship Awards, as well as a number of honourable mentions in each category.
Open Scholarship Awards (2021), for open scholarship carried out by scholars, librarians, citizen scholars, research professionals, and administrators.
- Awards:
- Doran Larson (Hamilton C), American Prison Writing Archive
- Gretchen Arnold (St. Louis U), Nuisance Laws and Battered Women
- Honourable Mentions:
- Kathryn Starkey (Stanford U), Mae Velloso-Lyons (Stanford U), Danny Smith (Stanford U), and Quinn Dombrowski (Stanford U), Global Medieval Sourcebook
- Mark Turin (U British Columbia), Digital Himalaya Project
- Visionary Futures Collective, COVID-19 Response Tracker
- Sara Humphreys (U Victoria), contributions to Why Write? A Guide for Students in Canada
Emerging Open Scholarship Awards (2021), for open scholarship carried out by undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early stage professionals.
- Awards:
- Eric Gonzaba (California State U, Fullerton) and Amanda Regan (Southern Methodist U), Mapping the Gay Guides
- Alix Shield (Simon Fraser U), contribution to The People and the Text
- Honourable Mentions:
- Chelsea A. M. Gardner (Acadia U), Sabrina C. Higgins (Simon Fraser U), Melissa Funke (U Winnipeg), Megan J. Daniels (U British Columbia), Carolyn M. Laferrière (U Southern California), and Christine L. Johnston (Western Washington U), Peopling the Past
- Jonathan Reeve (Columbia U), Open Editions
- Sarah Zhang (Simon Fraser U Library) and Allan Cho (U British Columbia Library), Hacking the Historical Data: Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada, 1886-1949
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) when we are next able to come together in person.
The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute would like to thank Alyssa Arbuckle (ETCL, U Victoria), Jon Bath (U Saskatchewan), Constance Crompton (U Ottawa), Laura Estill (St. Francis Xavier U), Jannaya Friggstad Jensen (ETCL, U Victoria), Tanja Niemann (Érudit), Jon Saklofske (Acadia U), Lynne Siemens (U Victoria), and Ray Siemens (U Victoria) for their involvement in the 2021 awards.
About the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute
The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) actively engages issues related to 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. C-SKI’s activities include awareness raising, knowledge mobilization, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national, and international levels.
C-SKI is located in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the UVic Libraries Digital Scholarship Commons. Originated in 2015, it is also the coordinating body for the work of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI).
C-SKI’s partners, through INKE, include: Advanced Research Consortium, Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing, Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Compute Canada, Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, Digital Humanities Research Group at Western Sydney U, Edith Cowan U, Érudit, Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Iter: Gateway to the Renaissance, J.E. Halliwell Associates, Public Knowledge Project, Simon Fraser U Library, U Victoria Libraries, and Voyant Tools, among others.
Doran Larson (Hamilton C), 2021 Open Scholarship Award Winner
The American Prison Writing Archive
https://apw.dhinitiative.org
The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is the first fully searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by people currently incarcerated in the United States. The APWA currently holds 2,662 essays by 1,066 authors, most of whom submit their work as handwritten manuscripts that are scanned, then transcribed by volunteers. In the APWA, people often treated as mere units inside the mass prison are extracting themselves from state and federal data piles, presenting themselves as human beings with full human and discursive dignity.
Gretchen Arnold (St. Louis U), 2021 Open Scholarship Award Winner
Nuisance Laws and Battered Women
nuisancelaws.org
After learning that the city of St. Louis was evicting domestic violence victims from their homes under the nuisance property law and that this was the de facto policy of the city and a widespread practice around the country, Dr. Arnold conducted several academic studies, including interviewing victims of the law, primarily low income women of colour. The nuisancelaws.org project was created to bring the academic scholarship to a wider audience, especially lawmakers who might consider changing the law or rethink implementing the law in their own community.
Eric Gonzaba (California State U, Fullerton) and Amanda Regan (Southern Methodist U), 2021 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Winners
Mapping the Gay Guides
https://www.mappingthegayguides.org
Mapping the Gay Guides is a free, online digital mapping project that explores LGBTQ American spaces since 1965 utilizing data derived from within Bob Damron’s Address Books. First published in an era when homosexuality was illegal in nearly every U.S. state and classified as a psychological disorder, the Damron travel guides helped gays and lesbians find bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people like themselves. Mapping the Gay Guides makes these sources, previously only available through scanned images in a paywalled database, available to the public.
Alix Shield (Simon Fraser U), 2021 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Winner
The People & the Text
http://thepeopleandthetext.ca
The SSHRC-funded The People and the Text (TPatT) research collective (with PI Deanna Reder) attends to the neglected literary archives of Indigenous authors, enabling project members to collect texts by Indigenous authors that had never been published because, at the time, there was no readership, no infrastructure or curriculum, no appropriate venues to get the story out, or no social status to add legitimacy to these texts to make them credible. It includes, for example, previously unpublished work by Secwepemc-Ktunaxa dramatherapist Vera Manuel, Inuit artist and writer Alootook Ipellie, and Métis activist James Brady, and since since May 2018, the website has been visited more than 8500 times.
Kathryn Starkey (Stanford U), Mae Velloso-Lyons (Stanford U), Danny Smith (Stanford U), and Quinn Dombrowski (Stanford U), 2021 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mentions
Global Medieval Sourcebook
sourcebook.stanford.edu
The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS), which began in 2016, is an online open-access teaching and research resource that publishes premodern texts in their original language and in new English translations, complemented by new introductory materials. Showcasing almost a thousand years of literary production from around the world—and in more than a dozen languages—the GMS tackles two interconnected issues: traditional publishers’ lack of interest in the translations made by scholars for their own research or for use in the classroom (these translations are often brief and/or non-canonical); and the pressing need for cross-cultural educational resources focused on the medieval world.
Mark Turin (U British Columbia), 2021 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Digital Himalaya Project
http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/
The Digital Himalaya Project is a collection, storage and open digital dissemination portal for scholarly content and research findings about the Himalayan region. Through long-term strategic partnerships with established digital library initiatives at universities, colleges, and institutes around the world, the Digital Himalaya website now connects a worldwide user community to a vast corpus of digital resources from or about India, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Tibetan plateau for free and easy download—without payment, subscription or password.
Visionary Futures Collective, 2021 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
COVID-19 Response Tracker
https://visionary-futures-collective.github.io/covid19/
The VFC is a fully open-access, collaborative initiative that focuses on data collection and visualization with the goal of inspiring hope, change, and visionary futures in a time of crisis for higher education, bringing together librarians, instructors, students, and artists working in permanent and contingent roles. The purpose of the project is not just to draw attention to the problems that plague higher ed, but to help people come together in order to move from fear into action and from action into hope: the present project addresses the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on labour and safety.
Sara Humphreys (U Victoria), contributions to 2021 Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Why Write? A Guide for Students in Canada
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/whywriteguide/
Why Write? has been created by a group of settlers in Canada working at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, with the intention of creating a welcoming and supportive academic writing textbook for all Canadian college and university students. We acknowledge with respect that we do our research, writing, and teaching on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen People, Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples, on which the University of Victoria is located. This textbook is an expression of our commitment to ongoing work of decolonizing our campus community both inside and outside the classroom.
Chelsea A. M. Gardner (Acadia U), Sabrina C. Higgins (Simon Fraser U), Melissa Funke (U Winnipeg), Megan J. Daniels (U British Columbia), Carolyn M. Laferrière (U Southern California), and Christine L. Johnston (Western Washington U), 2021 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Peopling the Past
https://peoplingthepast.com/
Peopling the Past is a new collaborative digital humanities initiative launched in Fall 2020 and run by a team of Canadian archaeologists, historians, and art historians specializing in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East with the goal of producing and hosting open-access multimedia resources for teaching and learning about real people in the ancient world and the real people who study them. Through the production of a podcast, educational videos, and a blog, we hope to participate in public history and the sharing of knowledge with history enthusiasts, as well as to provide open-access teaching resources usable in secondary and postsecondary classrooms.
Jonathan Reeve (Columbia U), 2021 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Open Editions
http://open-editions.org
Open Editions is an open-source framework for the enrichment of electronic scholarly editions. The project aggregates knowledge about literary texts—from textual scholars, literature professors, students, librarians, and members of the public—and organizes that knowledge as structured data, integrating it with the text itself, using the full breadth of TEI-XML markup.
Sarah Zhang (Simon Fraser U Library) and Allan Cho (U British Columbia Library), 2021 Emerging Open Scholarship Award Honourable Mention
Hacking the Historical Data: Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada, 1886–1949
https://osf.io/9zr6f/
Between 1885 and 1923, the Government of Canada collected about 33 million dollars ($334 million in 2016 dollars) from about 97,000 Chinese head tax payers who have long been forgotten in the annals of Canadian history. This ten-year project began at the University of British Columbia in digitizing the head tax records of these migrants from Library and Archives Canada (LAC), resulting in a dataset with nearly 100,00 records of the immigrants. Following that, UBC Asian Library undertook a project to normalize the variations in the immigrants’ origin (county name and village names), but the dataset has been largely underused by scholars. This project seeks to unlock its potential using digital, open-source and computational tools.