Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography/Collaborative Scholarship

Category Overview
Collaborative scholarship in academia is rapidly gaining prevalence, as evident in the increase in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research partnerships on individual campuses and across universities. The possibility of virtual correspondence fueled by the Internet is one of the primary catalysts for this development. Authors in this category address the benefits and challenges of collaboration, and suggest essential practices. This category includes an extended study on collaboration throughout the life cycle of a seven-year project, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE). Siemens reflects on collaboration at the end of every funded year of the project and explores how it evolves over time, how to develop and maintain positive and productive team relationships, how to integrate new team members into a project in the most optimal way, and how to deal with many other challenges that may occur within collaborative environments (Siemens 2012-2016). Authors also address partnerships in virtual communities and the importance of utilizing platforms designed to facilitate collaboration (Kondratova and Goldfarb 2004). Overall, this category is meant as a solid starting point for those preparing to launch collaborative projects.

Annotations
** Arbuckle, Alyssa, Nina Belojevic, Matthew Hiebert, and Raymond G. Siemens, with Alex Christie, Jon Saklofske, Jentery Sayers, Derek Siemens, Shaun Wong, and the INKE and ETCL Research Groups. 2014. “Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies.” Scholarly and Research Communication 5 (2). http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/150/299.
 * Arbuckle, Belojevic, Hiebert, and Siemens, with Wong, Siemens, Christie, Saklofske, Sayers, and the INKE and ETCL research groups provide three annotated bibliographies anchored in social knowledge creation. They claim that their project transiently represents interrelational research areas, and that it emphasizes “(re)shaping processes that produce knowledge” (n.p). The authors address the work’s intent, highlighting the importance of collaboration and open source. The authors discuss the principles to which this bibliography attends, addressing topics such as the book, print, remediation of culture, and interaction and collaboration. In addition, they explore the importance of digital tools and gamification to the practice of social knowledge creation. The three main parts of this document are: social knowledge creation and conveyance, game-design models for digital social knowledge creation, and social knowledge creation tools. Each of these sections begin with an introduction that presents an overview of the section’s content, and end with a complete alphabetical list of selections.

Brown, Susan. 2016. “Towards Best Practices in Collaborative Online Knowledge Production.” In Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens, 47—64. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
 * Brown addresses the affordances of web technologies that facilitate collaborative modes of online scholarly knowledge production. She argues that collaboration in the humanities still lags behind natural and social sciences. Brown discusses the key principles researchers ought to consider when choosing a platform for collaborative scholarship, as well as components of work processes and workspaces that help implement these principles into the project. She defines “best” practices as both the control over scholarly processes that bring together a number of contributors, and those that more optimally address interoperability, preservation, reuse, and the various ethical and professional considerations that are involved with group work. This article focuses on approaches to systems and standards that enable collaborative knowledge production online rather than on ways to coordinate collaborative relationships.

** Crompton, Constance, Cole Mash, and Raymond G. Siemens. 2015. “Playing Well with Others: The Social Edition and Computational Collaboration.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (3): n.p. http://src-online.ca/src/index.php/src/article/view/111/431.
 * Crompton, Mash, and Siemens study the use of microdata format to include larger groups of researchers and editors working on a digital social edition. They also provide readily parsable data about the content of A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript, the main object of their study. The authors argue that adopting linked data standards allows for an interconnection between texts and virtual collaboration across projects and scholars. Crompton, Mash, and Siemens explain how Resource Descriptions Framework in Attributes (RDFa) is well suited for academic projects and elaborate on the idea of encoding for the Semantic Web. They discuss technical decisions that would shift the focus of the encoder on data entry instead of the technical details of encoding. In their conclusion, the authors suggest that with the RDFa enhancement, A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript will provoke new research questions around the culture and contexts of the Tudor court.

Kondratova, Irina, and Ilia Goldfarb. 2004. “Virtual Communities of Practice: Design for Collaboration and Knowledge Creation.” In Proceedings of the European Conference on Products and Processes Modelling.
 * Kondratova and Goldfarb discuss knowledge dissemination and collaboration in online communities. They conduct a study on design functionality by looking at portal types that include institutional, governmental and organizational, professional, and social portals. The study includes 80 criteria grouped under content, discussion forum functionality, features, tools and learning modules, search functionality, membership, and topic experts. Based on this study, the authors developed a new template, as they believe that there is need for further similar investigations.

** Rotman, Dana, Jenny Preece, Jen Hammock, Kezee Procita, Derek Hansen, Cynthia Parr, Darcy Lewis, and David Jacobs. 2012. “Dynamic Changes in Motivation in Collaborative Citizen-Science Projects.” In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 217–226. CSCW ’12. New York: ACM. https://doi:.org/10.1145/2145204.2145238.
 * Rotman, Preece, Hammock, Procita, Hansen, Parr, Lewis, and Jacobs conduct a study that borrows from a motivational model in order to determine the various incentives of volunteers to participate and perform well in citizen science projects related to ecological scientific research. Although many successful citizen science projects exist, many do not fully take advantage of the collaborative possibilities between the scientists and volunteers; hence, studying the motivation of each party and designing an environment that rewards and motivates all parties could drastically improve the field altogether. After conducting the study, the authors found that volunteers are primarily motivated by their curiosity, drive for learning, and desire for conservation, whereas the scientists were primarily motivated by their career and scientific advancement more generally. They also found that the two most important motivational moments for volunteers are the first encounter with the project and group, and the wrapping up of a project when volunteers decide whether or not to participate in other projects. The authors also contribute a dynamic model that displays the engagement cycle of the participants throughout the different stages of the project.

+ Siemens, Lynne. 2009. “It’s a Team if You Use ‘Reply All’: An Exploration of Research Teams in Digital Humanities Environments.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(2): n.p. 225–33.
 * Siemens begins by identifying a contrast between conventional humanities research and digital humanities research: while the humanities disciplines have relied on predominantly solo research efforts, digital humanities research involves the collaboration of various individuals with a wide spectrum of skills. Siemens argues that the collaborative nature of academic research communities, especially in the humanities, has been understudied. This article is a step toward remediating this gap by examining the results of interviews conducted on the topics of teams, team-based work experiences, and team research preparation. The interview subjects identified both benefits and challenges of team research. Some of the challenges include relationship building with potential for future projects, communication challenges, funding, and team member retention. In conclusion, Siemens articulates a list of five essential practices: (i) deliberate action by each team member; (ii) deliberate action by the project leader; (iii) deliberate action by the team; (iv) deliberate training; (v) balance between digital and in-person communication.

Siemens, Lynne. 2012a. “Firing on All Cylinders: Progress and Transition in INKE’s Year 2.” Scholarly and Research Communication 3(4): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/72.
 * Siemens explores how collaborative practices evolve over the span of a project, using the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) second year of funded research as a case study. As with the previous study based on year one, the study here is carried out through a series of interviews with various researchers and administrators of INKE. The results yield that INKE’s members have developed closer relationships, allowing research to progress; the graduate research assistants also stated that their work experience has deepened their academic and collaborative skills. Some of the major challenges have to do with human resources and include the difficulty in securing postdoctoral fellows with technical skills and a project manager, mostly due to competition with other disciplines for hiring these professionals. A number of members and sub-research areas were in a period of transition, which resulted in a slight restructuring of the project. Siemens offers a number of potential solutions to the aforementioned challenges and addresses ways in which to structure the workflow during transitional periods that would help maintain the flow of the project and to swiftly integrate newcomers. She ends her article with various recommendations on how to sustain successful collaboration, which include having face-to-face meetings (in formal and informal settings) of geographically distributed team members, utilizing the most optimal methods for knowledge transfer in moments of transition, and taking into account ways in which university policies of partners may affect the project and its internal dynamics.

Siemens, Lynne. 2012b. “Understanding Long-Term Collaboration: Reflections on Year 1 and Before.” Scholarly and Research Communication 3(1): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/48/192.
 * Siemens addresses the advantages and challenges of collaborative work in the first year of the seven-year funded Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, a group of 35 researchers from Canada, England, Ireland, and the United States that focus specifically on Interface Design, Textual Studies, User Experience, and Information Management. The study is carried out in an interview format with seven collaborators, including graduate research assistants, researchers, members of the administrative team, and others. Findings indicate that team members share similar views on collaboration, saying that it yields grander research results and helps attain established goals, and that it requires a certain type of skill set to work together productively. The advantage of collaborative work is that it allows graduate students and researchers to interact with the larger community, and members of the community to learn and acquire various skill sets from each other. Disadvantages involve accountability within the project and to the funding agencies, the time-consuming nature of the project, the necessity of travel for personal meetings, and other potential personal or institutional tensions. Siemens summarizes the benefits and challenges of the first year of the INKE project, and argues that the skill set acquired by participating in such a project may come in handy in future academic and non-academic work.

Siemens, Lynne. 2013. “Responding to Change and Transition in INKE’s Year 3.” Scholarly and Research Communication 4(3): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/115/256.
 * Siemens addresses the collaborative nature of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project at the closing of the third year of funded research. One of the rationales for conducting this research, apart from documenting the nature of collaboration in order to enhance it in future years and lay foundation for the next funding cycle with lessons learnt, is the lack of scholarship that studies collaboration despite its increased adoption in the academic sphere. Siemens frames the third year as a transitional one for INKE since it is the period in which there was a change in sub-research areas, partners, and team members. The study is conducted through various interviews with team members and the data analysis is carried out through a ground theory approach. The major observations that emerged in relation to transitional phases and how to best manage them include an acknowledgment that the integration of new team members into a project takes time, and that an account of the project and team relationships, as well as project documentation, may be helpful. Another essential part of this process is formal and informal face-to-face meetings. According to Siemens, the selection of individuals with a collaboration-oriented mindset is useful since they are more likely to accommodate the short timespan allotted for new team member integration while still meeting research objectives.

Siemens, Lynne. 2014. “Research Collaboration as ‘Layers of Engagement’: INKE in Year Four.” Scholarly and Research Communication 5(4): n.p. http://src-online.ca/src/index.php/src/article/view/181/383.
 * Siemens discusses the fourth year of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, and focuses on how the nature of the collaboration over this period of the project has evolved. As with other studies on INKE’s collaboration, the study was carried out through a series of interviews with the researchers, graduate researchers, and administrative members of the team using a series of questions that could be extended and which are then analyzed with a ground theory approach. Results of year four reflect on a more mature period of the project where the nature of collaboration has morphed into a more fulfilling and closely bound relationship, with researchers from one area feeling more involved with research in other areas, and all team members, including research assistants, recognizing their role in the team in an important and rewarding way. Siemens states that a significant development in year four is team members’ ability to better balance INKE related work with outside research, sometimes even having INKE’s research drive motivate other work endeavors. One major challenge that still exists is coordinating across four time zones with little windows for possible meeting times. Overall, the interviews demonstrate that the team acknowledges the need and benefits of working together to attain research objectives. Siemens concludes with a set of suggestions for other teams working in a collaborative atmosphere.

Siemens, Lynne. 2016. “‘Faster Alone, Further Together’: Reflections on INKE’s Year Six.” Scholarly and Research Communication 7(2): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/250.
 * Siemens addresses the sixth year of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, namely the collaborative aspect of the long-term, large-scale project as it nears completion (in the seventh year). This study is carried out through a set of semi-structured interviews that are analyzed with a ground theory approach. According to Siemens, the team found collaboration to be a positive and beneficial experience overall, which was continuously strengthened through face-to-face interactions. Another finding pointed to how large-scale projects are in a constant stage of transition, where the change in pace of the project also affects the pace of work on an individual level and the nature of the collaboration. Recurring challenges that sprung up in earlier years and continued throughout the project include working at a distance with team partners, and the hiring and retention of postdoctoral fellows and research assistants. The documentation of this collaborative process and the lessons learned throughout the years are employed as a foundation for the next grant application and future collaborations.

Siemens, Lynne, Raymond G. Siemens, Richard Cunningham, Teresa Dobson, Alan Galey, Stan Ruecker, and Claire Warwick. 2012. “INKE Administrative Structure: Omnibus Document.” Scholarly and Research Communication 3(1): n.p. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/INKE/article/view/546/245.
 * Siemens outlines the administrative structure to be executed in the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. The document is meant to serve as an agreement between the various individuals and groups involved in INKE on how members will work with each other over the upcoming years of collaboration in order to achieve the goals that were outlined in the research application. Siemens breaks down the administrative structure of the projects and the various groups involved, and presents the guidelines and responsibilities for each group. The groups consist of various researchers and partners, as well as various administrative divisions overlooking and advising the project. The author also discloses the guidelines concerning intellectual property of knowledge created as part of the project, as well as the adopted policies for co-authoring work within the INKE framework. In the latter part of the document, Siemens includes excerpts from the grant application that addresses the broad range of key stakeholder areas and the project charter that outlines how the work will be disseminated, the future of the project, and the nature of the work between members of INKE.