Scholarship

Welcome to week 4! This is the last week of #DigPINS, though we hope, not our last week learning together.

We now turn our focus to how digital identities, environments, and teaching influence scholarly practices. This of course will vary from discipline to discipline and field to field, so a rich conversation will be needed for us to understand each other’s perspectives. Chime in! Questions to consider:

Who reads the scholarly work in your field?
Are there important forms of communication in your field which you don’t think of as “scholarship”?
How much of scholarly work in your field is available for those outside your field to access but also to understand?
Why would or wouldn’t this matter?
What impact does our scholarship have on those outside of our respective fields, in academia but also in the general public, and what is our responsibility to those people?

Things to do this week:

Video Introduction – (*Note we had a little video glitch for the first few minutes so you will only see the DigPINS Logo for a bit before the video fades in)
Continue the conversation! Continue to post questions and reflections, and listen and respond to others, on the blog, on Twitter, and in Slack.
There are three readings this week. The first, by Leila Walker, is about what social media has to do with scholarship. Then Rick Anderson discusses what we could do to make open access scholarship more comprehensible to audiences outside the research field. And finally, from Tressie McMillan Cottom, we’ve got a blog post reflection on what institutions need to have prepared to support the inevitable controversies which public scholarship can cause.We also have an optional reading from Jim Ottaviani (University of Michigan, so he is local – didn’t plan this) which attempts to measure the way that open access archives of scholarship increase the reach and life span of that research. This one does get a little technical in the middle; remember that it’s not a short story and you can skip to the end.
On Wednesday, June 17, we’re having a Twitter Share-Out. On Twitter, using #DigPINS, share with us an article (which already exists – you don’t need to write one – though that could be a great approach to a blog post) related to your discipline that can be accessed and understood by those outside your discipline.
1. Make sure it is accessible to anyone (not behind a paywall), otherwise it can be from a journal, a blog, a Twitter thread, or any other source you think it is a worthy contribution to your field.
2. Use this as an opportunity to use Twitter this week and reply to what your colleagues are posting (always using #DigPINS so we can all see the interactions).