Let’s face it: intellectual property is confusing, and the concept of “open” is even more confusing.

I’ve had collection directors assert that if they make low-resolution thumbnail images of their collections available online then they have satisfied the requirements of “open access.”

The Open Knowledge Foundation has published a working definition of what open means, and it ain’t what you might think.

opendefinition.org/okd/

Let’s work through their assertions and see what we can challenge or add.

A bunch of people locked in a conference room for a weekend is a poor way to decide who gets funded and who goes away empty handed. There has to be a better way.

I’d like to explore how we might use the rapid, iterative, team-based methodologies of “scrum” to create a fairer, more accurate, and more satisfying way of reviewing grants.

When the grant funding for the THATCamp project runs out at the end of March 2014, my position as THATCamp Coordinator will also end. I personally am not too worried about the future of THATCamp: it’s already sustaining itself very well, and to some extent I think that even if people cease to organize or go to THATCamps, it won’t be a tragedy — the spirit of THATCamp cannot die, and I think THATCamp has already had some highly laudable effects.

So it’s getting near the time when we’ll need to give the THATCamp community an even greater degree of ownership than it has already. I’m proposing a session here to figure out how to set up a THATCamp Coordinating Council to take over the (very few) tasks that I’m currently performing as THATCamp Coordinator. Let me make one thing clear: I don’t want to use this session to actually *appoint* said Council; I want instead to use this session to figure out the best *process* for setting up such a Council. Should I call for volunteers and appoint the people I think would be best, or should we hold some kind of elections? How would we hold such elections? And if that turns out to be an easy decision, then we can also talk about what the demographics and duties of such a Council should be. I want this to be a highly-tweeted session as well, one that involves the virtual #THATCamp community as much as possible.

I did think about pre-scheduling this session at THATCamp Leadership, by the way, but I was actually worried that planning a particular session about the THATCamp Coordinating Council would be, well, un-THATCampy. So if you have ideas about how this should go, please comment here, tweet @thatcamp, and/or (if you’re coming to THATCamp Leadership) speak your mind in person during the initial scheduling session tomorrow.

I’ve got a very very drafty set of thoughts about the demographics, duties, and processes of the THATCamp Coordinating Council, which I will create a Notepad for and attach to this post. Anyone with an account on thatcamp.org (not just this site) can log in to edit that document. To get a THATCamp account, go to thatcamp.org/signup.

In a recent essay, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” Todd Presner identifies as the core Utopian idea of the Digital Humanities, “participation without condition.” For Presner this concept begins with how DH is making the walls of the academy porous through its “conceiving of scholarship in ways that foundationally involve community partners, cultural institutions, the private sector, non-profits, government agencies, and slices of the general public,” thus expanding “both the notion of scholarship and the public sphere in order to create new sites and nodes of engagement, documentation, and collaboration.” In so doing, DHers “are able to place questions of social justice and civic engagement, for example, front-and-center; they are able to revitalize the cultural record in ways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy into the expanded public sphere.”

Presner’s discussion of what might be called DH’s “Participatory Turn” can be reformulated for humanities scholars and teachers into a more specific and crucial question concerning how we might best reach productively beyond the walls of the literary classroom. Such a question gains added force from three relevant contexts: (1) David Marshall’s observation that the current academy is a 19^th century institution in which a 20^th century curriculum is taught to 21^st century students; (2) The fact that most humanities undergraduates don’t even know that there is such a thing as humanities research; and (3) The assertion made by Donald Brinkman of Microsoft Research that humanists don’t just need “big data,” they need “deep data.” These contexts raise at least three important questions: (1) How can humanists bring our research into the graduate and undergraduate classroom?; (2) How can we best curate and explore our datasets? and (3) How can we fruitfully engage the public, “citizen humanists,” in the work of the humanities, helping to deepen our data and the questions we ask of it?

I think these are key questions both for the future of DH and the future of the Humanities, well worth discussing at a THATCamp devoted to Leadership. They cut across many aspects of DH work, from teaching, to coding, to archives, to editing, to publishing, to licensing, and crowdsourcing.

THATCamp has opened up many opportunities for participants to share and develop skills in areas such as text mining, project management, material culture, and digital pedagogy (to mention just a few of the topics I’ve seen in browsing past THATCamps). But I want to take a step back and ask what are the skills important to digital scholarship?  My interest in the topic comes in part from my work with colleagues on a Mellon-sponsored global benchmarking study examining the skills and competencies necessary to support (and practice) digital scholarship.  I think there are some important commonalities between this proposed session and Rebecca Davis’ proposal to explore “Learning Outcomes for a Globally Networked World,” but the focus here would be more on scholars/librarians/technologists/professionals than undergraduates. (It might be interesting to compare lists of skills and competencies important to these different constituencies.)

In addition to understanding what skills and competencies are important to digital scholarship, I’d also like to explore how best to cultivate these skills. How do digital humanities centers and programs help their members to gain the skills and knowledge to do innovative, significant work? I love the spirit of exploration, collaboration and play embodied by THATCamp, but I also see the need to enable digital humanists at various levels of experience to hone their skills over a longer period of time than a day or a day and a half. (Ryan also points to the need to go beyond 101 in some THATCamp sessions.) Could we imagine new variants of the THATCamp model? Are there possibilities for online/ hybrid training, mentoring, local reading groups, partnerships with DH centers, iterative THATCamps, etc?

As a member of the #transformDH collective, I want to propose a session where folks can discuss some of the transformative work in DH that is addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation, etc. Additionally, I hoped that we could create a zotero Library of these sources. Adeline Koh created a wonderful google doc that highlights many projects but I wonder if putting it into Zotero will help folks to consider citing and referencing these projects in the future?

Like Jeremy, I’d like for issues of diversity to be more embedded in the way we do the work of DH and part of that means more acknowledgement of the ways all these intersecting aspects of identity are at play even when there isn’t an obviously marginalized body present. Can we create strategies for our work that make it specific so as to make it more accountable?

Would welcome all kinds of thoughts on this!

There are many complicated debates about open-access, peer review, and the economics of publishing. It’s complicated, and many ideas have been proposed. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to summarize two of them. The conservative position is that pre-publication peer-review is essential to good scholarly work. It’s fair to say that this is the default position of most scholars and scholarly institutions. The radical position is that scholars should “liberate” their scholarship and publish only in open-access venues. As you would expect, these two ideas frequently antagonistic. Most of the concrete proposals are essentially competitive, as in attempts to replace existing journals with open-access journals or to move peer review to post-publication.

But there is no reason that the scholarly value of pre-publication peer-review and the scholarly value of open access need to conflict. What the academy needs is a solution that is realistic, and recognizes that the entrenched system of corporate publication and tenure review is unlikely to go away, or at least unlikely to change quickly. And it needs a solution that is optimistic because it tries to take advantage of the internet’s low marginal costs and rapid distribution that makes open access publication possible.

Our colleagues in physics, mathematics, computer sciences, and the like already have such a solution in the arXiv e-print server. arXiv hosts pre-prints (or “e-prints”) of articles that will be published in peer review journals. Scholars upload these documents which are then freely available to the world much sooner than they will be available in gated journals. (There are many descriptors for levels of open access: let’s call this “good enough” open access.) For those who need them, the peer-reviewed version of the articles will still be available in the traditional venues.

I propose a session that will bring together people who are interested in bringing about a pre-print server for the humanities. Make no mistake: the problem is not technological, it is institutional. What is needed to change academic publishing is the will to put such a solution in place—in a word, leadership. These are the kinds of people at THATCamp Leadership who could help such a session:

• scholars who could explain what they would hope to gain from a pre-print server,
• leaders of professional organizations (AHA, OAH, MLA, ACLS, etc.) who could make the idea palatable to scholars in their disciplines,
• grant writers and university administrators—especially in libraries—who would be willing to underwrite such an experimental project, and
• coder-scholars who would be able to build a prototype, or at least to discuss what would go into a prototype.

The goal of the session will be to produce a brief document that will describe the essentials of a humanities pre-print server. And hopefully the session will forge connections between the people who can make this idea happen.