MT6 and WT6 Public Humanities as Scholarly CommunicationCourse Chairs: Micah Vandegrift, Open Knowledge Librarian, North Carolina State University Libraries
Instructor: Micah Vandegrift, Open Knowledge Librarian, North Carolina State University Libraries;
Samantha Wallace, PhD candidate in English, University of Virginia, and affiliate with Public Humanities Lab, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures
Description: Conversations about the humanities and scholarly communication tend to focus on the evolution of the monograph through digital publishing platforms and tools; on why Open Access applies in the humanistic disciplines (or why it does not); or on how digital humanities are the bridge to an open future. This course will focus instead on exploring Public Humanities as a possible method and model for advancing scholarly communication across the humanities. Establishing a dialogue between Open Access and the Public Humanities will encourage a re-evaluation of what counts as meaningful scholarly communication.
Topics of discussion may include:
- How does the “open” of Open Access interact with the “public” of Public Humanities? What are the conceptual and practical overlaps between them? How can we interrogate these two terms by putting them in conversation with each other?
- What is the relationship between Public Humanities and new directions in scholarly communication?
- How do media and target audiences interact to shape the production of scholarship?
- How can scholars, especially early-career researchers seeking tenure, receive professional recognition for their work in the Public Humanities or other nontraditional forms of work?
- Can we draw a line between scholarly communication, Public Humanities and Open Access, and then advocate for them as important criteria for scholarship worthy of institutional support?
The two three-hour sessions will be broken down into several sections in order to:
- allow the participants to choose a framing topic, a list of which will be supplied by the instructors with attendant brief readings/resources;
- examine the topic through participants’ expertise and experiences (shared discussion);
- break out into small groups for hands-on brainstorming (for example: design thinking, think-pair-share, etc.);
- reconvene to combine our efforts into actionable directions, which could take the form of a white paper, position statement, manifesto, toolkit or some other utility.
The first day of the course will focus loosely on defining and exploring the field/concept/idea of Public Humanities. On Day 2, we will tie that to new methods in scholarly communication.
We aim in this course to collaboratively tackle a challenging topic and to push our community toward seeing that challenge in a new light
