Scholarly Communication Institute 7: June 28th-30th 2009

With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) began in 2003 with the goal of providing an opportunity for scholars and leaders in scholarly disciplines and societies, academic libraries, information technology, and higher education administration to design, test, and implement strategies that advance the humanities through the use of innovative technologies. Each Institute explores scholarly communication through a focus on one or more of four core topics:

• scholarly practices—the research, analysis, presentation, vetting, publication, and teaching by which scholars advance knowledge and inquiry;
• organizational models—the departments, disciplines, learned societies, and humanities research centers that act as sites of scholarly practices;
• infrastructure—the human and technical capacities that support scholarship locally and among institutions; and
• modes of working—the methods of inquiry that emerge from use of new technologies, such as collaborative investigation, virtual modeling, and Web-based informal discourse; and, recursively, how these new modes affect scholarly behaviors, organizational models, and infrastructure.

The upcoming session, SCI 7, will be held at the University of Virginia Library in Charlottesville, Virginia, June 28-30. It will focus on spatial technologies and methodologies—the specific modes of working they favor, the scholarly practices they enhance, and the infrastructure they demand to achieve scale and significance. Technologies that analyze and represent space and spatial relations—notably geospatial and mapping technologies—have gained widespread use both through sophisticated Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) software (commercial, like ESRI Arc Globe, and open source, like GeoServer/GeoNetwork) and through vernacular applications such as 2-dimensional mapping (Yahoo Maps), 3-dimensional globes (Google Earth), and virtual worlds (Second Life). We will also consider visualizations such as virtual modeling and concept mapping, as appropriate. SCI 7 will bring together accomplished scholars from the humanities and social sciences, as well as leaders in information technology and data stewardship, to explore the range of these technologies and their promise to advance humanities scholarship.

SCI is designed to frame a set of meaningful questions that lead to a plan for further action. Participants will convene for two full days in plenary and small group discussions, with ample occasion for informal discussions and to include time in the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab to explore key methodical questions in the context of ongoing research projects. The meeting will result in an action agenda, and SCI leadership will follow up over the following 12 months to advance activities identified by the participants.

Participants will include scholars who are working in imaginative and innovative ways with geospatial, mapping, and visualization technologies, including leading figures from historically-grounded disciplines such as geography, archaeology, and history that engage methodological questions posed by spatial relationships in their work. We will also involve leaders from research centers that could support possible follow-up activities. Individuals with expertise in libraries, advanced technologies, and publishing will join us to help us think through the implications of scholarly practices we discuss for the full cycle of scholarly communication, from research and discovery to analysis, presentation, dissemination, and persistent access.

In the months preceding the Institute, SCI will consult with leaders in a variety of disciplines to identify the key challenges and opportunities to use of spatial technologies in the humanities, with special attention to the critical methodical questions that these new ways of representing spatial and temporal relations pose to researchers. What are the implications for such scholarly practices as comparison and contextualization, temporal analysis and causality, study of global phenomena, and the possibility of new fields emerging from these?

SCI Background

From its inception, SCI has focused on cultivating leadership and encouraging and enabling the integration of new technologies into scholarship. SCI 1 assembled a group of pioneers in digital scholarly communication to review progress over the last two decades and lessons learned, and to identify strategies for continuing progress in the arts and humanities. The reflections of SCI 1 participants set the stage for following institutes. These Institutes have focused on several scholarly disciplines, the nature and potential of collaborative working structures, critical questions surrounding the use of new media technologies to advance scholarship in unique and innovative ways, and the institutional infrastructure essential to enable digital scholarly communication.

SCI leadership is committed to assisting participants develop real and reasonable goals that can be accomplished. Theoretical and practical discussions are designed to lead to an action agenda. To this end, SCI have worked closely with scholars and their partners from previous Institutes including practical ethicists, architectural historians, visual studies scholars, and leading humanities research centers. Additional information on the Scholarly Communication Institute can be found at http://www.uvasci.org/.