Revisiting the digital humanities through the lens of Indigenous studies—or how to question the cultural blindness of our technologies and practices

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Author : Coppélie Cocq

This article examines the benefits of putting Indigenous perspectives and the digital humanities (DH) in conversation with each other in order to elaborate a DH approach that is suitable for Indigenous research and to suggest critical perspectives for a more sustainable DH.

For this purpose, the article examines practices of data harvesting, categorizing, and sharing from the perspectives of groups in the margin, more specifically in relation to Sámi research. Previous research has emphasized the role of cultural and social contexts in the design, use, and adaptation of technologies in general, and digital technologies in particular (Douglas, 1987. Inventing American broadcasting; Nissenbaum, 2001. Computer, 34, 118–120; Powell & Aitken, 2011.

The American literature scholar in the digital age) and several scholars have argued for how the application of critical studies make a fruitful contribution to the DH (Liu, 2012. Debates in the digital humanities; McPherson, 2012. Debates in the digital humanities).

This article suggests an approach that addresses a need to acknowledge the diversity of technoscientific traditions. The perspectives of Indigenous groups bring this matter to a head. In order to make the DH more sustainable and inclusive, the development of the DH should be driven by cultural studies to a greater extent than it has been so far.

A sustainable DH also means a better rendering of the plurality of the cultural values, perspectives, and ethics that characterize our fieldwork and research subjects.

URL : Revisiting the digital humanities through the lens of Indigenous studies—or how to question the cultural blindness of our technologies and practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24564

Doctoral Students’ Educational Needs in Research Data Management: Perceived Importance and Current Competencies

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Author : Jukka Rantasaari

Sound research data management (RDM) competencies are elementary tools used by researchers to ensure integrated, reliable, and re-usable data, and to produce high quality research results.

In this study, 35 doctoral students and faculty members were asked to self-rate or rate doctoral students’ current RDM competencies and rate the importance of these competencies.

Structured interviews were conducted, using close-ended and open-ended questions, covering research data lifecycle phases such as collection, storing, organization, documentation, processing, analysis, preservation, and data sharing.

The quantitative analysis of the respondents’ answers indicated a wide gap between doctoral students’ rated/self-rated current competencies and the rated importance of these competencies.

In conclusion, two major educational needs were identified in the qualitative analysis of the interviews: to improve and standardize data management planning, including awareness of the intellectual property and agreements issues affecting data processing and sharing; and to improve and standardize data documenting and describing, not only for the researcher themself but especially for data preservation, sharing, and re-using. Hence the study informs the development of RDM education for doctoral students.

URL : Doctoral Students’ Educational Needs in Research Data Management: Perceived Importance and Current Competencies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.684

Preprints in times of COVID19: the time is ripe for agreeing on terminology and good practices

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Authors : Raffaella Ravinetto, Céline Caillet, Muhammad H. Zaman, Jerome Amir Singh, Philippe J. Guerin, Aasim Ahmad, Carlos E. Durán, Amar Jesani, Ana Palmero, Laura Merson, Peter W. Horby, E. Bottieau, Tammy Hoffmann, Paul N. Newton

Over recent years, the research community has been increasingly using preprint servers to share manuscripts that are not yet peer-reviewed. Even if it enables quick dissemination of research findings, this practice raises several challenges in publication ethics and integrity.

In particular, preprints have become an important source of information for stakeholders interested in COVID19 research developments, including traditional media, social media, and policy makers.

Despite caveats about their nature, many users can still confuse pre-prints with peer-reviewed manuscripts. If unconfirmed but already widely shared first-draft results later prove wrong or misinterpreted, it can be very difficult to “unlearn” what we thought was true. Complexity further increases if unconfirmed findings have been used to inform guidelines.

To help achieve a balance between early access to research findings and its negative consequences, we formulated five recommendations: (a) consensus should be sought on a term clearer than ‘pre-print’, such as ‘Unrefereed manuscript’, “Manuscript awaiting peer review” or ‘’Non-reviewed manuscript”; (b) Caveats about unrefereed manuscripts should be prominent on their first page, and each page should include a red watermark stating ‘Caution—Not Peer Reviewed’; (c) pre-print authors should certify that their manuscript will be submitted to a peer-review journal, and should regularly update the manuscript status; (d) high level consultations should be convened, to formulate clear principles and policies for the publication and dissemination of non-peer reviewed research results; (e) in the longer term, an international initiative to certify servers that comply with good practices could be envisaged.

URL : Preprints in times of COVID19: the time is ripe for agreeing on terminology and good practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-021-00667-7

Integrating Qualitative Methods and Open Science: Five Principles for More Trustworthy Research

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Authors : Lee Humphreys, Neil A Lewis Jr, Katherine Sender, Andrea Stevenson Won

Recent initiatives toward open science in communication have prompted vigorous debate. In this article, we draw on qualitative and interpretive research methods to expand the key priorities that the open science framework addresses, namely producing trustworthy and quality research.

This article contributes to communication research by integrating qualitative methodological literature with open communication science research to identify five broader commitments for all communication research: validity, transparency, ethics, reflexivity, and collaboration.

We identify key opportunities where qualitative and quantitative communication scholars can leverage the momentum of open science to critically reflect on and improve our knowledge production processes.

We also examine competing values that incentivize dubious practices in communication research, and discuss several metascience initiatives to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field and value multiple ways of knowing.

URL : Integrating Qualitative Methods and Open Science: Five Principles for More Trustworthy Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab026

Publication patterns’ changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal and short-term scientometric analysis

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Authors : Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld

In recent months the COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus) pandemic has spread throughout the world. In parallel, extensive scholarly research regarding various aspects of the pandemic has been published. In this work, we analyse the changes in biomedical publishing patterns due to the pandemic.

We study the changes in the volume of publications in both peer reviewed journals and preprint servers, average time to acceptance of papers submitted to biomedical journals, international (co-)authorship of these papers (expressed by diversity and volume), and the possible association between journal metrics and said changes.

We study these possible changes using two approaches: a short-term analysis through which changes during the first six months of the outbreak are examined for both COVID-19 related papers and non-COVID-19 related papers; and a longitudinal approach through which changes are examined in comparison to the previous four years.

Our results show that the pandemic has so far had a tremendous effect on all examined accounts of scholarly publications: A sharp increase in publication volume has been witnessed and it can be almost entirely attributed to the pandemic; a significantly faster mean time to acceptance for COVID-19 papers is apparent, and it has (partially) come at the expense of non-COVID-19 papers; and a significant reduction in international collaboration for COVID-19 papers has also been identified.

As the pandemic continues to spread, these changes may cause a slow down in research in non-COVID-19 biomedical fields and bring about a lower rate of international collaboration.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04059-x

Manuscript Accepted!: Collaborating on a scholarly publishing symposium for graduate students and early career academic faculty

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Authors : Teresa Auch Schultz, Rosalind Bucy, Amy Hunsaker, Amy Shannon, Chrissy Klenke, Iñaki Arrieta Baro

INTRODUCTION

As academic libraries expand their scholarly communication support, they also need to find ways to help educate graduate students about this area as well as market themselves.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

The University of Nevada, Reno Libraries created a one-day symposium, called Manuscript Accepted!, aimed at graduate students and early career faculty that would use faculty and library expertise to lead panels and workshops.

This article discusses planning for the event, including collaborating with other on-campus groups, working with publishers for financial support, and planning a program that would meet a variety of needs. Assessment of the first two symposiums, held in 2019 and 2020, shows that attendees valued the event while also highlighting the need for more targeted support for specific areas, such as the humanities.

NEXT STEPS

The Libraries plans to continue Manuscript Accepted! as a one-day symposium, although it will also look to ways to expand attendance. Finally, the Libraries is investigating ways to create smaller events that could be tied into the Manuscript Acceptance! brand but that help meet other needs of our attendees.

URL : Manuscript Accepted!: Collaborating on a scholarly publishing symposium for graduate students and early career academic faculty

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2385

Measuring academic entities’ impact by content-based citation analysis in a heterogeneous academic network

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Authors : Fang Zhang, Shengli Wu

Evaluating the impact of papers, researchers and venues objectively is of great significance to academia and beyond. This may help researchers, research organizations, and government agencies in various ways, such as helping researchers find valuable papers and authoritative venues and helping research organizations identify good researchers.

A few studies find that rather than treating citations equally, differentiating them is a promising way for impact evaluation of academic entities. However, most of those methods are metadata-based only and do not consider contents of cited and citing papers; while a few content-based methods are not sophisticated, and further improvement is possible.

In this paper, we study the citation relationships between entities by content-based approaches. Especially, an ensemble learning method is used to classify citations into different strength types, and a word-embedding based method is used to estimate topical similarity of the citing and cited papers.

A heterogeneous network is constructed with the weighted citation links and several other features. Based on the heterogeneous network that consists of three types of entities, we apply an iterative PageRank-like method to rank the impact of papers, authors and venues at the same time through mutual reinforcement.

Experiments are conducted on an ACL dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method greatly outperforms state-of-the art competitors in improving ranking effectiveness of papers, authors and venues, as well as in being robust against malicious manipulation of citations.

URL : Measuring academic entities’ impact by content‑based citation analysis in a heterogeneous academic network

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04063-1