Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group Proposal
March 2008
Defining New Forms of Scholarly Output in a Digital Age
The turn to the digital is creating new opportunities for scholarship, changing not only the way
knowledge is created, transmitted and shared, but what it is possible to create and ultimately the
nature of scholarship itself. Historically, it has been the sciences, in particular physics, that have been
leaders in defining new practices and forms of scholarly communication, e.g., Physics Letters for
rapid publication, AchivX for open access, etc. In 2002 a group of scholars meeting in Budapest
issued a statement – the Budapest Open Access Initiative – that crystallized a series of longstanding
concerns in the scientific academic community about the rising publication costs and restricted access
to the scientific journal literature. The Open Access movement that evolved from this today calls for
creating a content commons with unrestricted and free online access to the outputs of scholarly
journal research. Research funding agencies, such as the Wellcome Institute (UK), the National
Institutes of Health (USA) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) have mandated or recommended that the results of the research they fund be made
available. Traditional journal publishers, who normally require authors to surrender copyright for the
articles they publish, are responding by permitting authors to self-archive a version of their material
openly, subject to various conditions. Clearly there are costs to making information accessible, but
emerging partnerships among scholars, publishers, funders and libraries are experimenting with new
forms of output and business models that are more appropriate to the digital age. While the
international debates have focused to date on the sciences and scientific journals, it is timely to
explore these issues in the humanities and social sciences.
It is important to recall that humanists have also been pioneers in experimenting with new forms of
scholarly publishing. One of the first free electronic online journals, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review
was a humanities journal, and Humanist, an international electronic seminar on humanities computing
and the digital humanities, is one of the longest running online discussion groups. However, with the
exception of scholars in computing in the humanities, most humanists have had little interest in
changes in the technical substrate. The University of Virginia’s 2005 report entitled Summit on
Digital Tools for the Humanities notes that while most humanists use basic tools such as word
processors or spreadsheets, "only about six percent of humanist scholars go beyond general purpose
information technology and use digital resources and more complex digital tools in their
scholarship."1 Moreover, while the amount of digital information (texts, images, and so on) available
for humanities research has increased radically, allowing researchers to work with greater ease and
speed, "there has not been a major shift in the definition of the scholarly process that is comparable to
the revolutionary changes that have occurred in business and in scientific research." Independent of
research, all humanist scholars publish so there is at least the need to explore how the digital is having
an impact on the form and distribution of scholarly publications and possibly the nature of scholarly
practice.
Why are humanities scholars slow to adapt or to take up new practices? Is this true across the
humanities and is there variation within disciplines? Is it the lack of mentorship or models? Is it
uncertainty about the merit of electronic publications and new forms of scholarly artifacts? Is it the
lack of mechanisms for evaluating scholarship in more collaborative and participatory environments?
Is it the lack of infrastructure, both social and technical that discourages scholars, especially young
scholars, from engaging in untried practices? What incentives need to be put in place to entice young
scholars to take advantage of the networked knowledge environment?
A number of recent reports on digital humanities scholarship have addressed the need to redefine
scholarly output in a digital age.2 Monographs remain the primary intellectual currency for humanists,
1
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/
See for example, The University as Publisher: Summary of a Meeting Held at UC Berkeley on November 1, 2007
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/university_publisher.pdf ; “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the
American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences
www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls.ci.report.pdf ; MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the
Modern Languages http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/rep_it/guidelines_evaluation_digital ; Guidelines for
2
Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group Proposal
March 2008
and reputation and credentials are still largely based on the imprimatur and prestige of the publisher,
and scholars retain their copyright. But there is evidence of change. The potential to create and use
multimedia to support the scholarly apparatus in fields in which the visual is integral, however,
suggest it will only be a matter of time until the potential of digital media is embraced. The UK Arts
and Humanities Research Council3 in their 2006 report Peer Review and Evaluation of Digital
Resources for the Arts and Humanities focus on redefining the “research-oriented product” in the
humanities, and characterize a "digital resource" as "any material useful for research which is made
publicly available in a digital format." The report focuses closely on the relationship of content and
technological infrastructure, explaining that "content and structure do not function discretely in a
digital context." They further argue that there is need to raise awareness in the academy of the
"scholarly-technical" expertise of faculty involved in the development of humanities technology
resources. The report includes an Appendix with a thorough set of recommended guidelines for
reviewers of digital resources that address content, presentation, usability, "added value" and other
factors. These changing patterns of knowledge creation and consumption, the current emphasis on the
importance of knowledge mobilisation by scholars, and the global movement toward opening access
to scholarship and the creation of a digital content commons, all suggest that humanities scholarship
will change in a digital age. It is critical that scholars be the one defining and shaping these changes.
Working Group Participants
The Working Group will bring together senior and junior faculty and graduate students in the
humanities and social sciences from across all three campuses, each of whom has interest in exploring
the potential of the digital humanities for defining new modes of scholarship and scholarly output,
and the role of open access in the humanities. A Working Group chair will be selected at the first
meeting.
Daniel Bender
Leslie Chan
Frances Garrett
Matt King
Gale Moore
Kathleen Reilly
Virginia Lee Strain
Shafique Virani
Ben Wood
Asst. Prof., History, UTSC
Senior Lecturer & Prog Supervisor for New Media Studies, UTSC & KMDI
Asst. Prof., Center for the Study of Religion (CSR)
Doctoral Student, CSR
Director, KMDI, and Asst. Prof., Sociology & ICC (UTM)
Doctoral Student, Political Science
Doctoral Student, English
Asst. Prof., Dept. of Historical Studies, UTM, and CSR
Doctoral Student, CSR
Working Group Activities
The Working Group will meet once a month throughout the academic year, and will launch a blog to
circulate their findings, post relevant materials and engage colleagues. It will review the published
literature to gain a more thorough understanding of how scholars in the humanities are responding,
where and in what disciplines change is most advanced. One or more scholars prominent in the digital
humanities will be invited for consultation, and to give a public lecture. There is potential to conduct
a survey {see covering letter), and we will evaluate the feasibility of developing a collaborative grant
proposal, such as a SSHRC Research Development Initiative. A workshop on an aspect of the digital
humanities identified by the WG will be held at the end of the year to share our findings with the
University. In brief, our activities will increase our understanding, raise awareness of the issues in the
community and possibly identify new opportunities for humanities scholars afforded by the turn to
the digital.
Evaluating Faculty Research, Teaching and Community Service in the Digital Age
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/committees/facappoint/guidelines.shtml
3 http://www.history.ac.uk/digit/peer/Peer_review_report2006.pdf
Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group Proposal
March 2008
Budget
1 or 2 visiting scholars
Travel, accommodation, honorarium
Workshop (UofT) & hospitality
Hospitality for meetings
Blog *
Miscellaneous – telecommunications charges, photocopying, etc.
Total
* We will use open source software and serve this from one of our units.
$ 3,000
$ 500
$ 1,000
0
500
$5,000