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.

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.

The “Show Me Your Data” session proposal from THATCamp CHNM 2012 summarized the open research notes movement this way:

There has been some move in research to not just publish papers with the final results but to also release the raw data sets and even software for other researchers to verify the results and further discovery. There are even some futuristic claims that the data sets will be viewed as the ultimate results of research and the actual paper will be a secondary product.

That session focused on institutional repositories as ways to present data, but we’d like to focus more on the challenges posed by releasing research data to the public.

What happens when data collected for a monograph is removed from context?  Are there different scholarly and interpretive requirements for data presented at a single-record level?  When the same data is of interest to scholars and the general public, but the goals of each constituency are radically different, what happens?

We’d like to kick off the conversation by discussing a collaboration in progress. In research for Take Care of the Living, Jeffrey McClurken compiled a database of census and civil war service records for Pittsylvania County, Virginia.  As this database is of tremendous interest to local historians and genealogists, and since his own family is connected to that county, Ben Brumfield offered to put that database online.  However, the process has been challenging, as the interests and expectations of the public may be quite different from peer researchers, and a database compiled in support of a particular scholarly project turns out to be very different from a general-purpose database compiled for public use.