Category Archives: Humanities

Open Research for Inclusion – event round up

February 14, 2024Humanities, Open Research at Cambridge Conference, Publishing, Supporting Open ResearchOpen ResearchMandy Wigdorowitz

Dr Mandy Wigdorowitz, Open Research Community Manager, Cambridge University Libraries

On Friday 17 November 2023, participants from across Cambridge and beyond gathered for a hybrid meeting on Open Research from different perspectives. Hosted by Cambridge University Libraries at Downing College, ‘Open Research for Inclusion: Spotlighting Different Voices in Open Research at Cambridge‘ drew attention to different areas of Open Research that have been at the forefront of recent discussions in Cambridge by showcasing the scope and breadth of open practices in typically under-represented disciplines and contexts. These included the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums), and research from and about the Global South. A total of 84 in-person and 75 online attendees participated in the day-long event consisting of a keynote address, two talks, two panels, and a workshop.

The conference opened with a welcome address from Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith CBE FRS FMedSci, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and International Partnerships and the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics. Professor Ferguson-Smith emphasised the significance and timeliness of the conference and how it underscores the importance of the Open Research movement. She encouraged attendees to be open to new ideas, approaches, and perspectives that center around Open Research and to celebrate the richness of diversity in research.

Our keynote speaker, Dr Siddharth Soni, Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at Cambridge Digital Humanities and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of English, then addressed the audience with a talk on Common Ground, Common Duty: Open Humanities and the Global South, providing an account of how to think against neoliberal conceptions of ‘open’ and to reimagine what openness might look like if the Global South was viewed as a common ground space for building an open and international university culture. Dr Soni’s address set the tone for a rich, multi-layered exploration of Open Research on the day, urging attendees to think of open humanities as a form of knowledge that seeks to alter the form and content of knowledge systems rather than just opening Euro-American knowledge systems to global publics.

Dr Siddharth Soni Common Ground, Common Duty: Open Humanities and the Global South

The next talk was from Dr Stefania Merlo from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Dr Rebecca Roberts from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Fitzwilliam Museum who further explored the theme of the Global South in their practical perspective on how they managed the curation of digital archives for heritage management from their work on the projects: Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) and Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA). They reflected on the opportunities and challenges relating to the production and dissemination of information about archaeological sites and monuments in projects across Africa and South Asia as well as their experience working with and learning from local communities.

Dr Stefania Merlo and Dr Rebecca Roberts Open Data for Open Research – Reflections on the Curation of Digital Archives for Heritage Management in the Global South

An Open Research panel session was next which featured panellists with diverse backgrounds and expertise who addressed registrants’ pre-submitted and live questions. Some questions included the meaning of Open Research, its advantages and challenges, how Open Research can be engaged with by researchers (and in particular, early career researchers), and how it can be rewarded and embedded into the culture of research practices. There was engaging insights and debate amongst the panellists, led by Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, Professor Alexander Bird. He shared the platform with Philosophy of Science Professor, Professor Anna Alexandrova, Psychiatry PhD student Luisa Fassi, Cambridge University Libraries (CUL) Interim Head of Open Research Services Dr Sacha Jones, Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s Research Data Manager Dr Kiera McNeice, and Cambridge’s Head of Research Culture Liz Simmonds.

Open Research Panel

Following lunch, a second panel of scholars working across the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) took place. The panel was chaired by CUL’s Scholarly Communication Specialist, Dr Samuel Moore, and brought together experts who showcased their diverse work in this sector, from software development and museum practices to infrastructure and archiving support. The panel included Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell, CUL’s Senior Software Developer and Lead Research Software Engineer at Cambridge Digital Humanities, Isaac Newton Trust Research Associate in Conservation Dr Ayesha Fuentes from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dr Agustina Martinez-Garcia, CUL’s Head of Open Research Systems, and Dr Amelie Roper, CUL’s Head of Research. Each panellist presented on a specialist area, including Open Research code and data practices in digital humanities, collections research, teaching and learning collections care, and Open Research infrastructure. A lively discussion followed from the presentations.

GLAM panel

In a workshop session, Tim Fellows, Product Manager for Octopus, outlined how Octopus is a free and alternative publishing model that can practically foster Open Research. The platform, funded by UKRI, is designed for researchers to share ‘micro publications’ that more closely represent how research is conducted at each stage of a project. In a demonstration of the platform, Tim Fellows showed how Octopus works, it’s design, user interface, and application all with the aim of aiding reproducibility, facilitating new ways of sharing research, and removing barriers to both publishing and accessing research. An in-depth discussion followed which centered on the ways the platform can be used as well as its uptake and application across various disciplines.

Tim Fellows Octopus.ac: Alternative Publishing Model to Foster Open Research

The final talk of the day was on Open Research and the coloniality of knowledge presented by Professor Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH and Professor of Latin American Studies. She discussed the topic with a specific focus on the questions of possession and access by outlining projects by three Latin American artists who have engaged with Humboldt’s legacy and the coloniality of knowledge. Using videos and imagery, Professor Page encouraged the audience to consider how they might identify where the principles of Open Research conflict with those of inclusion and cognitive justice, and what might be done to reconcile those ambitions across diverse cultures and communities. An engaging discussion ensued.

Professor Joanna Page Open Research and the Coloniality of Knowledge

A drinks reception brought the event to a close, allowing attendees a chance to mingle, network and continue the discussions.

Special thanks to all speakers, attendees, and volunteers for making this event such a success. Stay tuned for information about our 2024 Open Research conference.

Open Research in the Humanities: Research Evaluation

September 14, 2022Humanities, research assessmentHumanities, open humanities, research assessmentadmin

Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the sixth and final of a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. Read the opening post here. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post discusses opportunities and challenges for research evaluation in the arts and humanities. The direction of travel in the Open Research discussion is away from any straightforward use of metrics in research evaluation. This is hugely in favour of the arts and humanities.

Opportunities

The arts and humanities have never used metrics in the same way as their STEM colleagues. This is partly because of the slower speed of publishing and the in-depth editorial process (18-24 months from submission to publication might be considered standard), and partly because ‘citation indices’ are less relevant when one’s contribution is to be part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation rather than to generate data from scratch (see above, on CORE data). So the diversification of research evaluation enshrined in DORA (https://sfdora.org), and the questioning of the uncritical use of metrics and altmetrics by administrators, grant funders and promotion committees, is a positive development. It allows for a general move away from established academic platforms and formats, as discussed above.

Support required

Some pressing questions about research evaluation remain, which might account for some perceived hostility from some quarters towards a move away from established academic platforms. Who is doing the work of reading and assessing these multiple new formats? How do we evaluate success? Is success measured in terms of ‘reach’ – number of Twitter followers or blog readers etc? This would take us down the route of clickbait and skew towards already-popular, English-language material; this is a particular danger with processes designed to evaluate web traffic.

What guidance is available for established academics looking to credit other colleagues for their social media contributions, in particular? An anxiety often expressed is that ‘there is a lot of rubbish on the internet’. How do we sift through? In general, research evaluation takes time and effort, and there is a sense that this work needs to be properly measured and quantified. For example, if an evaluator spends 20 minutes per CV on 60 CVs, that is 20 hours of work before one even gets into reading and evaluating actual outputs. In the context of a busy teaching term, such additional labour is barely possible and contributes to a general sense of stress within the profession. Looking for a kind of shorthand to facilitate swift and accurate evaluation of a wide range of (possibly unfamiliar) formats is therefore the pragmatic approach.

The discussion of narrative CVs in the DORA context implies an amalgamation of the traditional CV and the cover letter. In our institution as no doubt in others too, it would be useful to have some HR guidance here on what appointment panels should ask for (e.g. no cover letter, but a paragraph each on a candidate’s three main research achievements?).

There was a feeling in the working group that Cambridge is perhaps behind other universities who make ‘open research’ a category for assessment in itself, and who guide their employment panels and candidates accordingly. Indeed, Cambridge’s traditional division of the criteria for promotion into the discrete categories of ‘research’, ‘teaching’ and ‘general contribution’ seems actively to work against the whole idea of ‘open research’. It suggests unhelpfully that ‘service to the community’, ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ do not overlap. This division seems to have survived the recent overhaul of the academic promotions exercise.

Open Research in the Humanities: public engagement

August 8, 2022HumanitiesHumanities, public engagementadmin

Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the fifth of a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. Read the opening post here. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post public engagement in a humanities perspective.

The open access movement is fundamentally about public engagement in its broadest sense. It also allows for reflection on a differentiated notion of ‘public’, where publics can be specific as well as general (‘the general public’) and valued irrespective of size or situation.

Opportunities

The LERU pillars refer to a number of ‘citizen science’ projects where members of the public are actively involved in scientific research through collection and analysis of data. The A&H are also open to this model of public stakeholders co-producing research.

Evidently, many colleagues do outstanding work on social media spaces such as Twitter or Instagram, which are interactive by their very nature. These coexist alongside a more ‘traditional’ model of public engagement that involves the dissemination of research-level content in a ‘festival of ideas’ or other format. Such events tend to be well supported by HE institutions, and in the UK are influenced by the demands of the Research Excellence Framework, as regards the necessity of demonstrating ‘impact’ and producing ‘impact case studies’ (with the downside that the latter often generate spiralling bureaucracy, as the meta-work of proving one’s own impact takes far longer than the impactful activity itself).

Anecdotally, A&H academics are often proudest of the outreach and engagement activities that take place in the modest setting of the school classroom or local library, which embeds them in their communities, although rarely with an audience of more than, say, 25. They would like this work to be valued more than it seems to be currently.

A&H research, like any academic research, can sometimes seem given over to abstruse theoretical language, and it is worth reiterating this larger goal: ‘Scholars in the humanities and social sciences should strive to publish in ways that will make academic research understandable for larger audiences: that is, spell out clearly and concisely its societal relevance and the ethical soundness of its methodology, reduce the use of jargon, use non-textual and other experimental formats.’

Support required

Although there is good support institutionally in Cambridge from e.g. the Public Engagement team and the REF Impact team, some consolidation could be undertaken, as these are seemingly discrete entities. Indeed, Cambridge in particular seems very complex in its training infrastructure, comprising e.g. the Researcher Development team, the Postdoc Academy, the OSC team, the Data Champions, the Digital Humanities team, and so on… This makes it difficult for colleagues to advise each other, and particularly their untenured colleagues.

We also recommend more institutional reflection on how to value and recognize work that engages smaller, local publics as well as work of international renown and import.