The Changing Culture of Humanities Scholarship: Iteration, Recursion, and Versions in Scholarly Collaboration Environments

Abstract

<jats:p>The non-linear and iterative nature of scholarly research processes presents complexities with respect to how online collaborative systems manage versions both within interfaces and at the back end. This article maps out a two-part framework for thinking about versions and versioning in the context of contemporary scholarship and data preservation. The first presents four notable qualities of digital textuality that are intensified by the digital turn, and the second considers technical considerations flowing from these characteristics. The authors argue that the management of large humanities data sets and the design of associated interfaces, tools, and infrastructure need to recognize and preserve the dynamic, living nature of digital cultural artifacts and of scholarship on culture.</jats:p>

“That Machine from Hell”; Word Processing in Sociology

“…Secretaries sometimes would prepare only two or three drafts. This hampered the process of writing, as writing a scholarly paper involves refining and revising (Brown and Simpson 2014).…”

“…Some scholarship suggests we are currently in the midst of a new transformation of the socio-technical fabric of producing manuscripts. Digital technologies now allow us to write text which the author, authors, or others, can continuously update, creating version after version filled with new insights, but simultaneously keeping track of what changed between versions, and who made the changes (see, among others, Fitzpatrick 2011; Brown and Simpson 2014;Perry and Morphett 2015). To understand how such new arrangements in the socio-technical arrangements for producing knowledge come about, a study of another already complete transformation is helpful, namely the arrival of Word Processing.…”

“…Various combinations of people and tools can be used in preparing a (sociological) text for publication. Despite claims to the contrary (Perry and Morphett 2015;Brown and Simpson 2014), the process of writing was usually a social process, a collaboration between scholar, typist, other scholars etc. (Fitzpatrick 2011).…”

Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography

“…Such a tool would represent an opportunity for collaboration between different sectors of the knowledge economy and would allow the Semantic Web to develop as an evolving space of knowledge production and dissemination. Brown, Susan, and John Simpson. 2014.…”

An Open Social Scholarship Path for the Humanities

“…There are many different approaches to social knowledge creation and open social scholarship in the digital humanities and digital scholarship realms. For instance, Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship Susan Brown leads the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project (https://lincsproject.ca), which is working toward a pan-Canadian networked linked data infrastructure for research (Brown and Simpson 2014;Brown and Simpson 2015). Iter Community (https://itercommunity.org) is an evolving collaborative research environment that aims to facilitate social knowledge creation practices for communities that use Iter's discovery tools and publication platforms (Bowen, Hiebert, and Crompton 2014;Hiebert, Bowen, and Siemens 2015).…”