The blog of the Humanities Commons team
I joined the Humanities Commons team as community manager at the end of May. I had moved through a handful of university posts within a few years–as a graduate student, a postdoc, and an adjunct–so I recognized the particular value of Humanities Commons for people who have temporary, contingent, multiple, or no academic institutional affiliations.
It’s only been a year? It seems like two—yet there is one moment since the launch of Humanities Commons that stands out in my memory as particularly rewarding. Like many, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about access to data. I followed the Data Refuge events last spring. I participated in the March for Science in Princeton (since the crowd was about 4000:1 pro-science, it wasn’t exactly a challenge). We on the Humanities Commons team were of course aware of the proposed plans to shutdown the NEH and NEA, so when Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggested we mark Endangered Data Week by archiving all the white papers that have originated from grants issued by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, I was immediately intrigued. Continue reading “Doing What You Can”
Not long ago my colleague, Catherine Burdick, and I launched Afterimages, an online exhibition about the political graffiti that often stretches across the most prominent wall of Chile’s most iconic church. Selecting Humanities Commons as the project’s digital home was the first major conversation of our collaboration, and it remains one of the core decisions we have never reconsidered in the months of experimenting since. Continue reading “Afterimages: Hosting an Online Exhibition on the Commons”
When I started my first non-academic job, I asked myself, “What am I going to do with my dissertation?” It seemed such a waste that I’d put so much time and effort into original research, only to have it languish behind the locked doors of my alma mater (finding the time to turn it into a monograph wasn’t going to be an option). And as I’ve continued to work outside the academy, and the focus of my research has shifted from 19th-century French literature to scholarly communication, the kind of outputs I create have shifted too, towards what is often deemed “grey” literature: white papers, blog posts, reports. Humanities Commons allows me to express that shift with a holistic profile that represents not two (or more) discrete periods in my life, but a continuum of evolving humanities expertise. Continue reading “Sharing All the Scholarly Things”
A core value for me, as a scholar, is the open exchange of ideas—among scholars and among the public. Implementing this value requires access and transparency. As gratified as I’ve been, over the past decade or so, to see the growth of open-access publication and the democratized dissemination of knowledge, I have been increasingly dismayed at the financial motives and quality of many of the platforms that have emerged. Importantly, I have been concerned about the inequalities they elide and, at times, contribute to. Continue reading “Teaching and Learning with the Commons”
This post originally appeared on Christopher P. Long’s blog, and is cross-posted from there.
As we navigate the intense period of transformation in human communication through which we are living, identifying ways to nurture sustainable communities through which scholarship can be shared, discovered, and enhanced gains urgency. So many of the platforms through which we might cultivate scholarly lives together — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Academia.edu — are compromised by business models designed to maximize profit rather than advance scholarship. Continue reading “Humanities Commons and the Cultivation of Sustainable Communities”
This is a guest post by Brett Bobley, the Chief Information Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is cross-posted from the blog of the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities.
“It’s like arXiv, but for the humanities.”
What? Say that again?
“It’s like arXiv, but for the humanities.”
So my memory isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty sure it was late 2011, riding on a shuttle bus to the Berlin 9 conference, when Kathleen Fitzpatrick made that pitch to me.
What does it mean for the humanities to be invisible in the digital age? We often bemoan the fact that our disciplines are under-valued, under-funded, and downtrodden. Yet do we not, as academics, ourselves hold some responsibility for this situation? Continue reading “Why I Share My Work in CORE”
What is the relationship between the humanities in the university and the “public” in the public square? This is a question we tackle daily as art historians. Scholars who deal in visual culture-related subjects are often looked to to define, and even to model, public engagement in reconciling the arts. Seemingly the environments that art historians normally concern themselves with – museums, galleries, print and digital media – mesh more easily with public concerns than STEM. In the competition academic art history demands, we are exhorted to link humanities work with participation in vigorous public dialogue. Continue reading “Between Disciplines on the Commons”