[DHSI] CFP: Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship

What constitutes “knowledge”? It depends on who you ask. 

Proponents of increasing knowledge diversity in the academic sphere suggest that there are many overlapping knowledges: social, cultural, ancestral, scientific, familial, personal, scholarly, historical, tribal, and more. How do we ensure that digital research infrastructure under development is flexible enough to support diverse knowledges while standardized enough to ensure interoperability and sustainability? How can we facilitate multilingual digital scholarship using cutting-edge technological approaches without flattening culture and nuance? This is, perhaps, the conflict between the Zapatista concept of the pluriverse as articulated by Arturo Escobar, which upholds values of community autonomy, multiplicity, and relationality, and Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, which collapses individual experience and knowledge making into a corporate-controlled and profit-generating world. In a 2019 ScholarLed blogpost, Yasmeen Shorish and Leslie Chan call contemporary scholarly communication a “monolithic system,” one that has been “effective in colonizing the world of knowledge, and allowing powerful institutions and corporations in the Global North to continue their dominance, while further deepening the asymmetrical hierarchy and epistemic divide in global scholarly communications.” Shorish and Chan argue that by moving away from totalizing gestures toward “autonomous, community-governed local initiatives [and] a network of solidarity for truly diverse and inclusive scholarly communication” we might resist knowledge homogeneity and epistemic injustice.

We will continue these conversations at Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship: Canada, the 10th annual Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership winter gathering in Victoria, CAN (17-18 January 2023). 

Please note that although this is an in-person event we are exploring options for virtual presentation and participation should COVID-related travel and meeting restrictions come into place at the time of the event and for those who are unable to attend in person.

Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship seeks to highlight open social scholarship activities, infrastructure, research, dissemination, and policies. The INKE Partnership has described open social scholarship as creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. At Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship we will consider how to model open social scholarship practices and behaviour, as well as pursue the following guiding themes:

• Community: How do we best foster humanities and social sciences research, development, community building, and engagement through online, omnipresent, and open community spaces?
• Training: How can we adapt existing training opportunities and develop new opportunities in emerging areas to meet academic, partner, and public needs for open scholarship training?
• Connection: How can humanities and social sciences researchers collaborate more closely with the general public? What are the best ways to bring the public into our work, as well as for bringing our work to the public?
• Policy: How do we ensure that research on pressing open scholarship topics is accessible to a diverse public, including those who develop organizational or national policy?

We invite you to register for this event to join the conversation and mobilize collaboration in and around digital scholarship, with specific focus on:

• open social scholarship now and in future 
• knowledge diversity, epistemic injustice, and knowledge equity  
• multilingual digital scholarship 
• community building, engagement, and mobilization
• collaboration and partnership for shared initiatives and activities
• digital scholarly production
• open access and open technologies 
• knowledge sharing and preservation
• alternative academic publishing practices
• FAIR and CARE principles for data 
• digital research infrastructure
• social knowledge creation
• stakeholder roles and activities
• social media
• public humanities
• research data management 
• AI for humanistic pursuit 

We invite proposals for lightning papers that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area, as well as proposals for relevant project demonstrations. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words, plus list of works cited), and the names, affiliations, and website URLs of presenters. Longer papers for lightning talks will be solicited after proposal acceptance for circulation in advance of the gathering. Please send proposals on or before 11 October via bit.ly/RRR-OSS

This action-oriented program is geared toward leaders and learners from all fields and arenas, including academic and non-academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, librarians and archivists, publishers, members of scholarly and professional associations and consortia, open source practitioners and developers, industry liaisons, community groups, and other stakeholders. Aligned with the online Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) conference in November 2022 and building on previous INKE-hosted events in Whistler and Victoria (2014-21), the 2019 CAPOS conference, and our combined, online INKE-CAPOS conferences (December 2020 & 2021), we hope to simultaneously formalize connections across fields and open up different ways of thinking about the pragmatics and possibilities of digital scholarship.

Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship events include:

• Featured talks by Chad Gaffield (U16; U Ottawa) and Constance Crompton (U Ottawa)
• Lightning talks, where authors present 4-5 minute versions of longer papers or reports circulated prior to the gathering, followed by a brief discussion (papers may be conceptual, theoretical, application-oriented, and more)

• Next Steps conversation, to articulate in a structured setting what we will do together in the future

Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship is sponsored by the INKE Partnership, CAPOS, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Please consider joining us for what is sure to be a dynamic discussion!

This program is organized by Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, Jon Bath, Rachel Hendery, and Tully Barnett, on behalf of our international Advisory Board and Group.