Frontiers | Digital Scholarship: Identity, Interdisciplinarity, and Openness | Eileen Scanlon | Digital Humanities

"This paper considers the impact of changes in the landscape of scholarly communication on the activities of academics. These changes are considered through the lens of the practices examined by educational technology academics at the Open University who have conducted a number of related research projects under the theme of digital scholarship. This paper reviews the changes to the definition of scholarship and interviews conducted on academic practices conducted as Phase 1 of these activities [see also Scanlon (2013)]. It then comments on the findings of Phase 2 of the project which investigated the use of social media and the usefulness and visualization of such activities. The findings are considered in the light of trends toward working practices involving interdisciplinarity and openness.

Introduction

There have been considerable changes in the landscape of scholarly communication the past ten years which have implications for the activities of academics. In this paper, the practices adopted by educational technology academics at the Open University UK (OUUK) are used to consider the impact of these changes. A number of research related research projects under the theme of digital scholarship have been conducted there. For example, the Digital Scholarship project (DISCO) conducted by a team at the Open University from 2009 to 2013 was developed in order to understand the changes in communication and publication practices of academics in higher education due to the impact of the information age [see, e.g., Castells (1996)]. The information age has resulted in a changed landscape which offers researchers new ways of working and also offers new kinds of academic output for educators to incorporate in their teaching. Essentially, the project was an exploration of current academic practices in digital scholarship. This work was inspired by recognition of the impact of the information age on communication both in the sciences and humanities. This impact is becoming quite profound. It affects the way that academics do their work (for example, by access to new tools), the way they work in distributed teams (for example, by access to means of communication which are now available), the way that they communicate their findings (for example, by contributing their papers to open repositories, or discussions to wikis) and the way that they communicate with the public (for example, by writing blogs)...."