Create Change Canada

New forms of scholarship are emerging from the possibilities of the digital networked environment. Here are a few examples:

Electronic books can be more than just digital conversions of printed volumes:

•The Electronic New Variorum Shakespeare is a project at the University of Alberta to digitize and publish online the Modern Language Association’s New Variorum Shakespeare series of editions, currently published in print. Each variorum edition offers a unique record of the history of a given Shakespeare text. Although Shakespeare variorum editions have appeared in print since the late eighteenth-century, the format’s complex textual notes and copious amounts of commentary make the variorum an excellent candidate for digital adaptation.

•The open-access Arabidopsis Book, available only in electronic form, is a dynamic information resource that will evolve with the state of knowledge. Each invited chapter reviews an important and interesting aspect of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, with reference to what is known in other plants and in other kingdoms. Chapters can be kept up-to-date either by the original authors or by other scientists, who can add an addendum to incorporating new results in a timely manner or alert readers to contentious issues.

Virtual communities of scholars with shared interests are emerging on a regular basis, made practical by the simple and ubiquitous e-mail list:

•H-Net is an international consortium that coordinates over 100 free e-mail lists in the social sciences and humanities. Each list is edited by a team of scholars, and has a board of editors that controls the flow of messages, commissions reviews, and rejects unsuitable items. H-Net enables scholars to easily communicate current research and teaching interests; to discuss new approaches, methods and tools of analysis; to share information on electronic databases; and to test new ideas and share comments on the literature in their fields.

•TAPoR is the Text Analysis Portal for Research, a collaborative initiative of six Canadian universities to build a centralized gateway to representative texts and sophisticated text analysis tools. The computing infrastructure is available to host and support research projects using text, text encoding, text transformation, and XML technologies.

•The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative brings together mapping technology with digital data on historical and archaeological resources, enabling users to create digital maps that display a wide range of cultural material and use place and time as a common element.

Weblogs (or blogs) and wikis are fast becoming commonplace on the web, and many explore scholarly topics. According to Nature, these can be useful “both before publication, when generating ideas, and after publication, when discussing results.” There are many examples, including:

•Cartography is a blog for members of the Canadian Cartographic Association.

•The RealClimate blog provides commentary by climate scientists aimed at the public and journalists to provide a quick response to developing stories and context that is sometimes missing in mainstream coverage.

•Law professor Michael Geist explores intellectual property issues with his blog.

•OpenWetWare is a wiki for sharing of biological engineering protocols.

The development of open access to scholarship is being tracked by philosopher Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog. The library at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign keeps in touch with its campus community via its Issues in Scholarly Communication blog.

E-journals reach beyond the simple translation of a print journal to electronic form:

•Vectors is a multimedia, open-access journal focused on how technology shapes social relations. It comprises moving and still images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and more. It explores a “fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship” and “emerging scholarly vernaculars.”

Encyclopedias are hardly new, but today scholars are developing and maintaining a new generation of dynamic, web-based resources that are readily updated and openly available. Wikipedia — “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” — is a popular success, but there also examples that apply rigorous peer review:

•Each entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before being made public.