This past June, after wrapping up the activities for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, some ETCL members traveled to Montreal for the INKE conference Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada. The event was held at the University of Montreal on June 17th. To see the full program and list of speakers, click here.
The conference kicked off with a welcome by Ray Siemens, ETCL director, followed by Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s opening keynote, who discussed the risks of relying on commercial infrastructure providers, such as Amazon Web Services, to maintain scholarly communication platforms and services.
Then, ETCL participation at the conference began with Graham Jensen, Assistant Director and Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow. He presented on a research scan on knowledge mobilization in the humanities developed at the lab. Later in the day, he had a lightning talk on the progress of the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons as a tool for open social scholarship.
Another lab member, Alan Colin-Arce, graduate research assistant, presented on the knowledge diversity research scan, a project that seeks to synthesize ideas and initiatives that challenge the academy’s systemic privileging of dominant colonial perspectives.
Last but not least, Kyle Dase, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the lab, co-presented in two lightning talks on creating an open-sourced database from a foundational annotated bibliography of English poet John Donne, and on independently publishing the John Donne journal in an open access format.
To close the conference, Jonathan Bengtson, University Librarian at the University of Victoria, discussed in his keynote the plans to further the role of the UVic library in open scholarship and community engagement.
Other topics addressed in the conference by presenters from outside the lab included the ecosystem of open access in Canada, practicing open social scholarship in digital humanities projects, and the value of collaboration and library support in open scholarship.
Other Activities in Montreal
In addition to participating at the INKE conference, the ETCL team attended other academic events happening in Montreal around the same time. On June 18th, the team attended the INKE Partnership meeting. Later that day, Graham Jensen and Dan Tracy (visiting scholar at the ETCL) held a workshop and feedback session for the Canadian HSS Commons.
The rest of the week, some lab members participated at the conference of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, also held at the University of Montreal. At this event, Graham presented a poster on the Canadian HSS Commons (pictured below), Alan talked about the geographic inequalities in web archiving, and Kyle introduced his network edition of John Donne’s Verse Letters. Graham also presented a paper on the importance of open approaches to digital archiving and preservation, with specific focus on how the Canadian HSS Commons expanded its repository by developing a custom batch process for migrating open access journal article PDFs and metadata.
It was a busy (and warm) week in Montreal for the ETCL team, but it led to great conversations about the state of open social scholarship in Canada. Many thanks to ETCL’s Coordinator Adar Charlton, Michael Sinatra, and the rest of the team at the University of Montreal for organizing and making this event possible.