For decades there has been pressure on those working in academia to engage more seriously with the publics they serve (Woodward 2009). Steps have been taken in this direction, see the rise of the public humanities as a movement (Wikipedia n.d.)—the international transition from closed, for-cost publishing to open access research (Suber 2012) and the establishment of public engagement priorities (Gibson 2009). Circumstances and opportunities for academic collaboration with wider communities have only improved with the rise of networked technologies and the resultant de-centering of authority in regard to who is considered to be an expert on any given subject. Narrowing down to the humanities, in particular, the development and international establishment of digital humanities (DH) as a robust and vibrant field of study has opened further doors; those in DH often have the proclivity, skills, and aptitude for working with colleagues across disciplines and outside of traditional academic institutions (Brown 2016). The prerequisites are in place for socially creating knowledge, collaborating across groups, and engaging with publics in more comprehensive and sustained ways. In what ways are academics and those who are academic-aligned taking up this form of more open, and more social, scholarship?

In January 2019, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership came together for Understanding and Enacting Open Scholarship, our sixth annual winter gathering to discuss topics related to open social scholarship. This gathering brought together approximately 70 researchers, students, librarians, and academic-aligned groups around the topics of scholarly communication, open access, digital scholarship, and community engagement. This special issue is representative of some of the key event proceedings. Contributions included in this issue reflect the many ways that open social scholarship can be understood and undertaken.

The INKE Partnership brings together a broad, diverse group to advance understanding of, and resolve crucial issues in, the production, distribution, and widespread engagement of digital scholarship in Canada and beyond. Through inclusive, participatory, and publicly engaged digital scholarship, the INKE Partnership addresses scholarly communication challenges. For the better part of a decade, key researchers and leading national organizations have collaborated on scholarly communication, open access, digital publishing, data management, knowledge mobilization, social knowledge creation, and community engagement—laying the foundation for open social scholarship. Growing from such roots, as well as contemporary online practices, open social scholarship enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways. This work is guided by objectives consensually developed by the INKE Partnership: to create and share knowledge, communicate scholarship, engage in relevant policies, and research and develop open digital scholarship initiatives.

These INKE Partnership objectives are evident in the three common threads that run through these proceedings: methodologies, tools and projects, and infrastructure. Each topic is critical for the consideration of open social scholarship as a whole. Notably, various authors suggested different methodologies for open social scholarship, drawing on interdisciplinary expertise to consider new and innovative ways to approach this kind of work. Some authors present an in-depth look into the community-engaged projects they are pursuing in the open social scholarship realm, and offer details on specific initiatives as well as lessons learned and possibilities for future endeavour. Infrastructure for open social scholarship is also acknowledged, as methodologies and projects are only possible if there is robust support that cuts across disciplinary and institutional lines.

The first major thread involves methodologies for open social scholarship. In this context, Julia Bullard questions how much of the content of existing subject heading systems are appropriate for open systems for scholarly communication, and how much must be redesigned with openness at its core. In a similar vein, David Wrisley argues for a broadening of open scholarship practices to include more transnational contexts. In particular, he calls for Anglophone colleagues in North America (and perhaps Europe) to collaborate with the Arab world in this domain. Taking a more technical angle, Richard Lane argues that machine learning and topic modelling approaches would add a degree of rigour and computational traction to open social scholarship initiatives and outputs. In the same direction, Luis Meneses et al. propose to challenge some of the preconceived notions of digital libraries by making repositories more dynamic while promoting public engagement and open scholarship.

Another cluster of papers highlights various open scholarship projects and suggested approaches taken by authors. The interdisciplinary nature of open scholarship means that these sorts of projects herald from various fields, and authors included here range from 16th century manuscript studies to community mapping projects in the Balkans to archival game considerations. With a focus on the Aldus@SFU project, Alessandra Bordini and John Maxwell identify points of alignment between today’s digital humanities projects and projects that encourage the production and circulation of the major works of classical antiquity. Casting an eye to digital scholarship in Croatia, Constance Crompton and Tristan Lamonica present an outline of their experimental workflow and toolkit for the Rijeka in Flux project as they develop a framework to connect entities in the project data. Finally, Jon Saklofske argues that now-defunct massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) could be spaces of open scholarship engagement if they were reimagined as archival experiences via virtual archaeological sites.

Infrastructure also figures in these proceedings, as authors consider the national and institutional contexts for undertaking open scholarship work. As a unique conglomerate of academic researchers, librarians, and academic-aligned partner organizations, INKE Partnership members are attuned to these wider contexts as well as their unique role within them. For instance, due to the rarity of university-community partnerships in the humanities, not much is known about such endeavours. Lynne Siemens takes the INKE Partnership as her case study in a review of how a successful humanities-based university-community partnership can run. From a more national perspective, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) provides information on the recent merger of Canadiana.org and CRKN, which broadens the capacity for both organizations to engage in nation-wide open scholarship initiatives.

There is no single model for academic/public collaboration, or other socially engaged work in the humanities, nor are emerging scholars necessarily trained in how to do this work during their graduate degrees. INKE Partnership members are exploring how to integrate and prioritize this kind of engagement in their academic practice. Some do so by interacting and sharing in online spaces like social media platforms, commons, forums, or Wikipedia, with the understanding that various community groups can work together to produce knowledge. Others pursue this line of work by creating public digital editions, exhibitions, or mapping projects—either through crowdsourcing or smaller-scale interventions—which offers another route for mutual knowledge creation. Networked technology can facilitate virtual coalescence over shared topics of interest as well as provide a mechanism for INKE Partnership members to do more public-facing work. The development of Pop! as a publication outlet by INKE Partnership members based at Simon Fraser University also represents a positive development into the possibilities of alternative academic publishing. Our peer review process for these proceedings—blind, in-person community peer review—is another way in which we’re exploring how to render the scholarly communication process more social. The stage is set for the growth of social knowledge creation and open social scholarship practices in the humanities, and the INKE Partnership contributions included here provide entry points into this type of engagement.

Works Cited

Brown, Susan. 2016. “Towards Best Practices in Online Collaborative Knowledge Production.” In Doing Digital Humanities, edited by Constance Crompton, Richard Lane, and Raymond G. Siemens, 47–64. London and New York: Routledge.

Gibson, Cynthia M. 2009. “Research Universities and Engaged Scholarship: A Leadership Agenda for Renewing the Civic Mission of Higher Education.” Campus Contact. https://compact.org/

Suber, Peter. 2012. Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wikipedia. n.d. “Public Humanities.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_humanities

Woodward, Kathleen. 2009. “The Future of the Humanities in the Present & in Public.” Daedalus 138 (1): 110–23.