Étiquette : Humanities

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Open at the Level of (Para)text: Critical Intertextuality and Discursive Notation as Open Research Practices in the Humanities

Author : Jenni Adams

This article contends that open research practices and principles are embedded in humanities research paradigms in ways that are not currently visible within either the open science–dominated framework of open research or the discourse of open qualitative research that is emerging as its corrective.

Focusing on practices around citation (here framed as critical intertextuality) and discursive notation, I explore the ways in which these everyday practices of humanities discourse manifest forms of openness that should be more fully recognized within the discourse of open research.

Occurring at a time when efforts to measure, incentivize, and mandate open research at institutional, funder, journal, and research assessment levels risk delegitimizing forms of inquiry that lie outside existing frameworks, such reconsiderations of unrecognized practices of openness in the humanities are both crucial and timely.

URL : Open at the Level of (Para)text: Critical Intertextuality and Discursive Notation as Open Research Practices in the Humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7845

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Open for Debate: Situating Open Research for the Humanities in a Neoliberal Setting

Author : Beatriz Barrocas Ferreira

Open research has been widely promoted as a means of democratising knowledge, yet its uptake in the humanities has remained limited and frequently marked by ambivalence. In the context of growing institutional investment in open research, this article interrogates what openness entails for the humanities within a research setting increasingly shaped by neoliberal rationalities.

While often framed as a democratising force, the implementation of open research policies seems to have largely aligned with market-oriented imperatives, emphasising transparency, efficiency, and economic return.

The article argues that the friction between open research and the humanities arises not from an aversion to openness per se, but from the instrumentalization of open research and its imposition as a universalising, science-centric framework that fails to accommodate the pluralistic dimensions of humanistic research. Rather than dismissing openness, the article calls for a reimagining of open research grounded in pluralism, situated ethics, and disciplinary specificity.

URL : Open for Debate: Situating Open Research for the Humanities in a Neoliberal Setting

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7850

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What Does Openness Mean for the Humanities? Redefining Ethical and Reflexive Practices in Open Research

Author : Adeola Eze

Notions of openness in research have largely been shaped by scientific principles of transparency, efficiency, and replicability, operationalized through standardized workflows, interoperable infrastructures, and measurable impact. Endorsed by funders and policy frameworks, this model often misfits humanities and social science epistemologies in which knowledge is interpretive, historically situated, and ethically entangled with context.

This article critiques policy-led definitions of openness by tracing how open access and open science have been implemented through compliance regimes, metrics, and author-facing payment models, with uneven consequences across regions, languages, and institutions. Rather than rejecting open research, the article reinterprets it through a humanities lens.

It develops a theory of interpretive openness through Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work and extends it through three historical case studies—the cento, scholastic glossing, and Derrida’s margins—which show how form-bound reuse, annotation, and participatory reading have long operated as infrastructures of public meaning-making.

The article then connects these genealogies to contemporary digital publishing and editorial infrastructures, including preprints, open peer review, and web annotation, and argues for open research designs that value interpretive labor, visible process, and community accountable infrastructures.

URL : What Does Openness Mean for the Humanities? Redefining Ethical and Reflexive Practices in Open Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7873

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EN

Humanities scholars’ needs for open social scholarship platforms as online scholarly information sharing infrastructure

Authors : Daniel Tracy, Graham Jensen

The contemporary scholarly communication environment is characterized by the growth in mandates and infrastructure for open access publication and open approaches to the research lifecycle, with a consequent explosion in the number of online platforms seeking to provide infrastructure for open scholarship. These include corporate academic social networks and scholar-governed infrastructure created as a reaction against those networks, as well as the recent major transformation of the social media landscape in the wake of changes at Twitter (now X), previously a major outlet for scholarly engagement with the public.

Analysts of this environment have pointed out that most platform initiatives focus on narrow use cases rather than building up solutions through a holistic understanding of scholar workflows. This exploratory study uses focus group interviews to draw out responses to one academically governed platform, the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, in the context of humanities scholars’ existing work.

It explores humanities scholars’ needs and behaviors related to sharing scholarly information with each other and broader audiences, particularly on the Internet. Feedback from participants sheds light on opportunities and challenges for academy-governed infrastructure for “open social scholarship.” Themes identified include technical fatigue and burnout in the current multi-platform environment, sustainability, and desires to reach and engage the right academic and non-academic audiences when appropriate.

URL : Humanities scholars’ needs for open social scholarship platforms as online scholarly information sharing infrastructure

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v30i2.13742

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EN

Research Data Management in the Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities in the Canadian Context

Authors : Stefan Higgins, Lisa Goddard, Shahira Khair

In recent years, research funders across the world have implemented mandates for research data management (RDM) that introduce new obligations for researchers seeking funding. Although data work is not new in the humanities, digital research infrastructures, best practices, and the development of highly qualified personnel to support humanist researchers are all still nascent.

Responding to these changes, this article offers four contributions to how humanists can consider the role of “data” in their research and succeed in its management. First, we define RDM and data management plans (DMP) and raise some exigent questions regarding their development and maintenance.

Second, acknowledging the unsettled status of “data” in the humanities, we offer some conceptual explanations of what data are, and gesture to some ways in which humanists are already (and have always been) engaged in data work.

Third, we argue that data work requires conscious design—attention to how data are produced—and that thinking of data work as involving design (e.g., experimental and interpretive work) can help humanists engage more fruitfully in RDM.

Fourth, we argue that RDM (and data work, generally) is labour that requires compensation in the form of funding, support, and tools, as well as accreditation and recognition that incentivizes researchers to make RDM an integral part of their research.

Finally, we offer a set of concrete recommendations to support humanist RDM in the Canadian context.

URL : Research Data Management in the Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities in the Canadian Context

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.9956

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FAIRness of Research Data in the European Humanities Landscape

Authors : Ljiljana Poljak Bilić, Kristina Posavec

This paper explores the landscape of research data in the humanities in the European context, delving into their diversity and the challenges of defining and sharing them. It investigates three aspects: the types of data in the humanities, their representation in repositories, and their alignment with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

By reviewing datasets in repositories, this research determines the dominant data types, their openness, licensing, and compliance with the FAIR principles. This research provides important insight into the heterogeneous nature of humanities data, their representation in the repository, and their alignment with FAIR principles, highlighting the need for improved accessibility and reusability to improve the overall quality and utility of humanities research data.

URL : FAIRness of Research Data in the European Humanities Landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications12010006

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EN

Neither Computer Science, nor Information Studies, nor Humanities Enough: What Is the Status of a Digital Humanities Conference Paper?

Authors : Laura Estill, Jennifer Guiliano

This paper explores the disciplinary and regional conventions that surround the status of conference papers throughout their lifecycle from submission/abstract, review, presentation, and in some cases, publication.

Focusing on national and international Digital Humanities conferences, while also acknowledging disciplinary conferences that inform Digital Humanities, this paper blends close readings of conference calls for papers with analysis of conference practices to reckon with what constitutes a conference submission and its status in relationship to disciplinary conventions, peer review, and publication outcomes.

Ultimately, we argue that the best practice for Digital Humanities conferences is to be clear on the review and publication process so that participants can gauge how to accurately reflect their contributions.

URL : Neither Computer Science, nor Information Studies, nor Humanities Enough: What Is the Status of a Digital Humanities Conference Paper?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.8090