{"id":3,"date":"2011-05-07T20:34:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-07T20:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/?p=3"},"modified":"2011-05-07T20:47:43","modified_gmt":"2011-05-07T20:47:43","slug":"musings-on-digital-scholarship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/2011\/05\/07\/musings-on-digital-scholarship\/","title":{"rendered":"Musings on Digital Scholarship"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday May 5th Harvard held its second Digital Scholarship Summit<\/a>, focused on exploring three broad areas:
\n\u2022 How research technologies are changing the landscape of knowledge creation and what that means for quality and value of research
\n\u2022 How new forms of research are being made available in the research community now e.g. new forms of publishing, and in the future e.g. future of research reproducibility, and
\n\u2022 What all of this might mean in terms of the future scholar\u2019s portfolio.
\nThe speakers and panel members of the Digital Scholarship Summit represented decades of expertise in scholarly communications and academic research, as well as representing new forms of scholarship in a variety of disciplines. It was a day of such intense discussion and energy that a crowd of scholars, practitioners and administrators remained afterwards and only due to necessity had to depart.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt that research technologies are changing the nature of knowledge creation \u2013 this is evidenced across the disciplines, with a particular upswing in the humanities (see for example the Harvard Metalab<\/a>) after several decades of computational development in the hard sciences. Crowdsourcing has also had significant benefit in many areas; one case in point is in tracking infectious diseases through healthmap.org <\/a>There are endless and fantastic examples \u2013 including some fun looks at culture as evidenced in ngram<\/a>s \u2013 where if you type in \u201cdigital scholarship\u201d you\u2019ll see a very pronounced peak climbing just before the year 2000.<\/p>\n

Recently, the Economist <\/a>published a report on the prevalence of data and the opportunities and \u201cheadaches\u201d that provides. Clearly, information overload is not going away and yet we no longer have the capacity to store it all \u2013 so where is it going and are we losing the knowledge gems that lead to human improvements? The answer is, no one has this figured out yet. There is an increasing need for computational and human ways to handle selection better. This is compounded by the dynamic changes in technologies and inability to provide access to information no longer formatted for newer processors and interfaces. How do we make information accessible? Interoperability will be a huge issue for time to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What is evident to me, as one of the organizers of the event and as an individual consumed by developing meaningful ways in which new knowledge can be applied for the greatest possible benefit, is the tremendous challenge scholars face in this \u201cin-between\u201d time where the infrastructure is not quite in line with the imaginative ways in which research is evolving. The \u201cin-between\u201d represents a break from the time when the journal article set the standard for scholarship excellence (some time in the 1600\u2019s), and today where scholarship is represented in a multitude of forms, and germinating from all around the world \u2013 sometimes in the least expected places. I say this as a relative newcomer to academia \u2013 so am open to being corrected.<\/p>\n

Some of the more telling comments that highlight this \u201cin-between\u201d time included very fundamental questions such as:
\n\u2022 What do scholars want in terms of a research portfolio?
\n\u2022 What kind of institutional framework needs to exist to support it?
\n\u2022 How can genuinely scholarly scholarship be engendered ?
\n\u2022 Will scholars choose to work in academic institutions or in other types of guilds or entrepreneurial endeavors where they are free to create what inspires them?
\n\u2022 Do we need to return to the first principles of scholarship?<\/p>\n

The Summit provided an incredible amount of information to process in terms of understanding scholar\u2019s research behavior, the role of information and information environments in the creation of new knowledge, and presented serious questions to address with respect to knowledge creation, transfer, and reuse. The coming together of scholars, practitioners, and administrators was not only desirable but indeed an important starting place.\u00a0 Now we need to figure out some critical opportunities on which to act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday May 5th Harvard held its second Digital Scholarship Summit, focused on exploring three broad areas: \u2022 How research technologies are changing the landscape of knowledge creation and what that means for quality and value of research \u2022 How new forms of research are being made available in the research community now e.g. new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2608,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39914],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-digital-scholarship"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2608"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/6"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mlkennedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}