PLEASE NOTE: This is currently being re-formatted
Authorship | Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities | MLA CommonsAuthorship | Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
““author” invokes a sense of genius, originality, ownership, (and maybe social responsibility) as the originator of a collection of distinctive ideas.”
Wondering - as an extension to this I would also add the notion of caring enough about one’s ideas to make them as viable as possible through thoughtful engagement with them and research.
“Many can write, but far fewer can and do publish.”
Wondering - perhaps this is one of the paramount differentiators for an author, the acknowledgement by an external actor to back the knowledge generated (whether with money or with reputation) and to make it available through its networks. Today the dissemination of text for a public is just a tweet away, thus authorship is available to an unprecedented number of people
Wondering - I’d be reticent to ascribe a term such as authorship in this context, given that it may lack the depth that one expects in an academic context. Just because you can write something does not make you a writer, in the professional sense of the word. The same should be said for authoring.
Opening the Journal: How an Open-Access E-Journal Can Serve Scholarship, the Liberal Arts, and the Community | AHA
“By offering a range of internship activities-from marketing to teaching-we hope to demonstrate to liberal arts students the range of career paths available to them.”
Wonderful - This is a great way to expose students to the supply chain that makes up the elements of the publishing process. Perhaps with this exposure some may be able to break the code on establishing new business models for viable and sustainable knowledge creation that can also be lucrative for researchers. Everyone, after all, has bills to pay.
“Interns also practice the liberal arts skills of research, contextualization, and clear communication.”
Wonderful - this is a great way to also build a sustainable community for future content creation.
“we creatively developed areas for undergraduate participation beyond world history and global studies, such as teaching, marketing, study abroad, experiential learning, and web 2.0 and social media.”
Wonderful - This is great to see the embracing of multidisciplinary peers to strengthen the content and knowledge being created.
Planned Obsolescence
“need to reform peer review for the digital age, insisting that peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open”
Wonderful - I love the fact that this is being challenged. As mentioned in the other article, it would be great if perhaps people would join up to peer review based on the promise of gaining social capital for doing so.
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 1
“screw over Early Career Researchers and anybody else who can’t persuade their funders to give them the up-front fees required by publishers for Open Access journals.”
Wondering - is there a kind of alignment between this and music artists who have looked for alternatives to the record companies? Is this the publishers being short-sighted and ignoring potentially mutually beneficial business models in lieu of holding on to old business models?
Conclusions: What We Learned | Writing History in the Digital Age
“three primary needs: digital platforms to host and archive our writing, copyediting and technical assistance to meet production standards, and most importantly, an impartial arbitrator of the open peer review process to communicate with an editorial board on whether a work deserves its institutional stamp of approval.”
Wondering - This is an interesting mix of people, process and technology to enable knowledge production. I am curious as to whether there would also be a need and/or space for public and/or academic policy to help with ensuring that the historical record remains inclusive.
“our reputation capital”
Wondering - Social capital is a strong influencer in many different aspects. This would be an interesting way to calibrate engagement in the production of knowledge.
“Some commenters on the volume wisely raised concerns about its potential downsides. Might unfiltered comments on an Internet forum, where poorly-chosen words have consequences beyond their intended meaning, risk public humiliation for authors?”
Wondering - Could this be something as simple as having a moderated feedback mechanism? This way questions or comments that don’t contribute to the knowledge in a constructive way can be addressed individually? This does also point out the fact that digital publishing may need a different kind of resourcing model, to allow for this kind of attention and responsiveness to engagement from readers and contributors.
“Moreover, I wondered whether, in the event that a piece was not accepted for final publication in this volume, it would be eligible for publication elsewhere, having already been posted online for public review.”
Wondering - is this business-model driven? I.e. do journals want “dibs” on first publishing so they can make money from charging for access?
“To what extent does this readership represent “the public” at large?”
Wondering - But does it have to represent the public at large, or is it enough that it represents the “interested” public at large, given that they are the ones likely to be involved and contribute to knowledge creation and/or knowledge validation.
“aspiration of some contributors to this volume that “history in the digital age” will underscore the limitations of scholarly practices and will permit radically new forms of relationship between academic historians and various sites of historical knowledge and production outside of the academy.”
Wonderful - This is a great way to also create a more inclusive historical record.
“Kathleen Fitzpatrick persuades us that the most challenging barriers to the transformation of scholarly communication are not technological, but instead “social, intellectual, and institutional.”
Wondering - this seems like more of a culture change (no pun intended) for the knowledge creators and the underlying mechanisms that support and enable them.
“Nevertheless, both agree that the Internet is interrupting the traditional academic practice of filter-then-publish, thereby raising the potential for publish-then-filter,”
Wondering - I think that metadata is going to be an important part of this democratized digital future, as a way of not only filtering, but also aggregating knowledge from the vast amounts that will be (and already are being) produced. Having said that, there should also be a way to certify that knowledge has gone through a certain amount rigour in its creation to be able to separate more objective knowledge from opinion.
“Technology did not create these debates over who “owns” the past, but it does make it harder for professional historians to ignore them.”
Wondering - I think this also calls into question where these historians may come from. If we want a non-western or non-hegemonic view of the past, technology can now accommodate navigating through knowledge from more than a single point of view. The trick is, making sure that historians outside of the present mainstream are given the respect and credibility that they deserve, even if their interpretations of the past from non-mainstream and/or non-hegemonic points of view may go against convention.
“Despite her own misgivings about the web-driven black Confederate myth, Leslie Madsen-Brooks argues that crowdsourcing creates key opportunities for historians to engage with a public that clearly cares about the meaning of the past, and Amanda Sikarskie also emphasizes the role of “citizen scholars” in the “co-creation of content rather than consumption of content.” Similarly, essays from history educators Thomas Harbison and Luke Waltzer, and also Andrea Lawrence, demonstrate how technology can deepen critical thinking and writing about the past in their classrooms.”
Wonderful - I love the idea of information being shared and potentially new knowledge being generated as a result of people producing their own takes on things. This does also point out the fact that there is a certain accountability for the credibility of that knowledge that we need to make sure we ascribe to the correct places, while remembering that this accountability may no longer lie simply with historians.
“explores how the collectively-authored Wikipedia platform permits us to peel back the layers of “popular memory” and “professional history” behind each entry, revealing more about contested meanings of the past than do traditional forms of scholarship”
Wondering - This is interesting as a present-day adaptation of something from our past. In the old days of manual transcription of religious texts, it was not uncommon to find commentary from the transcribers in the margins, commenting on what they were transcribing, thus capturing the “popular memory as Wolff seems to be doing with Wikipedia.
Structuring your Open Textbook – BC Open Textbook Authoring Guide
“These indices are critical to the ability to recall or retrieve the things we know and remember.”
Wonderful - we need to look at ways of improving findability of content whether it’s someone’s first or 10th visit. This article relates to this in terms of the different modes of seeking for information: http://boxesandarrows.com/four-modes-of-seeking-information-and-how-to-design-for-them/ thatVargas 3/25/2018 6:05 PM in group 9ZoPkNzN
“Memory and understanding are promoted by the use of a structure that mimics the structures we all use within our minds to store information.”
Wondering - this seems to align well to the idea of using people’s existing mental models to allow for better retention into accommodation of new concepts rather than assimilation, à la Piaget.