SCI 2014 has concluded … and planning for SCI 2015 has begun

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Paolo Mangiafico

SCI 2014 has come and gone, and by all accounts it was a stimulating, fun, and relaxing week, where new projects were launched, new collaborations were formed, and ideas were nurtured.

In the publicity around the RFP last spring, we wrote:

Put together a working group that includes not just people you regularly interact with, but also people you want to work with but haven’t yet been able to. We’ll cover costs for your team to spend four days together in Chapel Hill, NC, in an Institute that’s part retreat, part seminar, part development sprint, part unconference.

You set the agenda, you define the deliverables. We bring everybody together and supply the environment and a network of peers to help stimulate and develop creative thinking and provide a diversity of perspectives about changes in research methods, publishing, digital humanities, digital archives, or other topics related to transformations in scholarly communication.

And by the end of the week, I think we could safely say we did exactly what it said on the tin.

Throughout the week many of the participants were active on Twitter, recording words and images of what was happening at SCI. I’ve collected a representative sample of these in this Storify thread, which gives a sense of how this year’s Institute went.

Early in the new year we’ll be announcing the RFP and dates for next year’s SCI, so keep an eye on this web site and our Twitter feed if you would like to submit a proposal to participate next year.

Project team in discussion on the first day

The weather was great – some teams met outside

Lunch in the DuBose House

Project team doing a charrette

Reception at the National Humanities Center

Gardens and DuBose House at the Rizzo Center

On the importance of place and time: where we’ll be, and what we’ll be doing at SCI in November

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Paolo Mangiafico

Schloss Dagstuhl

When we first started planning for this new iteration of the Scholarly Communication Institute, a model that was mentioned several times was the Dagstuhl Seminars. Schloss Dagstuhl (Dagstuhl Castle) is an academic research center in the German countryside, and every year it hosts a series of seminars on informatics, where researchers from around the world gather to focus on specific topics. For a few days, participants live and work together in a setting far removed from their usual context, and the environment and informal structure contributes to outcomes that would be less likely back in the usual flow. In the area we’re working in – scholarly communications – Dagstuhl hosted a seminar in 2011 on the future of research communication, which led to the creation of FORCE11, a new organization supporting advancements in scholarly communication (slides reporting on that workshop can be found here).

View from Erice

I have fond memories of having spent time at a similar place in Italy, the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, in Erice, Sicily, where I worked for a summer as an intern when I was a student. Erice has a similar model – a magnificent setting and an informal structure, with lots of social, cultural, and culinary activities mixed in with the scholarly work. Erice is a beautiful place, perched on a mountain 750 meters above the western coast of Sicily, with stunning views all around. Erice is also an ancient place, founded by the Elymians, and later occupied by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, and Normans. The science center now makes its home in a four restored former monasteries, and scholars meet and live in halls and cells where medieval monks formerly roamed.

During the summer I was there, participants got to meet, listen to, and have dinner with people like Peter Higgs, Sheldon Glashow, and Victor Weisskopf. Mornings spent having coffee in a cloister, or evenings over drinks in a local pizzeria were as important to the experience as the meetings and discussions in the conference halls during the day.

DuBose House, Meadowmont

This year, the Scholarly Communication Institute will be held in Chapel Hill, NC, at the Rizzo Conference Center. We don’t have a castle, nor centuries-old monasteries, (and don’t – yet – have any Nobel Prize winners attending) but the DuBose House and gardens, situated on a hilltop just outside the “southern part of heaven” are about as delightful as we get in this part of the world.

Pergola outside the DuBose House

The conference facilities are recent, having been built by the University of North Carolina in the past 15 years, but the house at the core of the Rizzo Center (where we’ll be having lunches) and the gardens surrounding it date to the 1930s, with the property it sits on having a history that dates back to a land grant from the Earl of Granville in 1757. (See a history of the Rizzo Center and DuBose house here.) The facility has a bar on site, for informal and social meetings, and a pergola, balconies, and outdoor tables in the gardens and around the grounds, which will be conducive for working outside, or just taking a break in a beautiful setting if the weather cooperates. A short walk down the hill is Meadowmont Village where participants in SCI can find restaurants, shops, and other amenities.

The place is important, but so will be the format. This is not a conference where participants are coming with prepared presentations, or with program tracks that define discussion topics in advance. The schedule is only very lightly structured – meal times are fixed, as are a few opening and closing programs, but the rest of the schedule is a balance of totally unstructured time for project teams to work amongst themselves, and “plenary” times when all of the SCI participants will gather in a single conversation around topics of shared interest. The participants will set the agenda, and guide the shape of the activities and their outcomes.

In our early planning notes for SCI we wrote:

DuBose House gardens

… the SCI invites working groups, rather than individuals, in order to foster broad awareness of complexity and tackle it collaboratively. Moreover, the new SCI invites multiple working groups in order to engineer the opportunity for serendipitous cross-pollination among different but related themes and challenges. Formal “downtime” (meals, walks, breaks) is an important part of this strategy. These unfettered water-cooler moments often give birth to great ideas. Thus, the SCI’s program will be flexible and as participant-directed as possible; we cannot schedule breakthroughs, but we can attempt to create conditions that favor them. The format is meant to help create an environment conducive to the kind of happy accidents that are born of the freedom to work hard with minimal constraints.

On November 9, this experiment will begin, and we hope to conclude four days later exhilarated and energized, having made new contacts, learned new things, developed new ideas, and perhaps started to build new programs. And yes, probably a little tired. But we hope that everyone will leave with a plan for what they can do to advance and influence the changing landscape of scholarly communication when they return to their usual work.

If you’re interested in joining us next year, keep an eye on this blog and the @TriangleSCI twitter stream, where early in the new year we’ll be announcing dates and an RFP for next year’s SCI.

DuBose House gardens

McLean Hall, meeting venue at the Rizzo Center

Scholarly Communications and the latent scholar

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Paolo Mangiafico

In a couple of months, a group of creative scholars, librarians, publishers, artists, and technologists will come together in Chapel Hill for four days for the first Scholarly Communication Institute to be held in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, after a decade of SCI being held at the University of Virginia.

One of the issues we’ll be grappling with is how to connect the work of scholars with broader publics – not just in one direction (experts sharing what they know with other audiences) but also inviting and encouraging engagement of people from all walks of life in the creation and synthesis and understanding of useful knowledge together.

In an essay titled “Face the People and Speak” in Boom: A Journal of California last winter, Abby Smith Rumsey (convener and director of the former iteration of SCI at Virginia) wrote about her vision for a changing scholarly communication landscape:

In this world of proliferating arenas of expertise and specialization, we accept that we are, each and every one of us, “the general public” in all things except our own particular area of knowledge or skill. To the mycologist, a microbiologist is a layman, and to the expert on Leonardo da Vinci, the Nobelist in economics is at best an amateur in matters art historical. But, collectively, we advance knowledge and attend to the responsible use of that knowledge.

This year’s theme at the Triangle SCI is Scholarship and the Crowd, and participants will work on envisioning and building models for fostering and sustaining an ecosystem that is more catholic in its scope than what we usually think of when we hear the term “scholarly communication”.

It’s not just about peer reviewed journals, specialist conferences, and experts talking with other experts in narrowly defined disciplines. There is a global community of latent scholars – readers and writers and learners and thinkers; curators, data collectors, and people who are creating rich data sets of the human experience simply by leaving traces of their daily activities in the online spaces so many of us now frequent.

How do we help activate this richness, understand its opportunities, limitations, and constraints, and begin to develop norms to ensure that the benefits accrete into a commons shared by all, and don’t just accrue to an already privileged elite?

Rumsey writes:

It goes almost without saying that we shall have to find a new term for the work ahead, for “scholarly communication” fails to connote either the audiences for or the intentions behind this communication. I have been using the term “expert knowledge” in lieu of “scholarship” to acknowledge that information vital to our well-being is generated by many who are not traditionally considered scholars and that what is of greatest value is the knowledge that such experts create from raw information and data. Whatever term we embrace in the end, what matters is to focus equally on those who create and those who use knowledge. … The challenges and opportunities we will face in the coming decades will demand … humility, concern, and commitment to engage in translating expertise for multiple audiences and attending to the consequences of using knowledge responsibly.

Stay tuned. As the SCI transitions to the Triangle a new group is taking up this challenge. Together we’ll work to shape this broader meaning of “scholarly communication” and to build models that demonstrate it in practice.

[ Image credits: Communication by elycefeliz – https://www.flickr.com/photos/elycefeliz/3224486233 and World travel and communications recorded on Twitter by Eric Fischer – https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/6635655755 ]

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Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute

Category Archives: 2014 Institute

SCI 2014 has concluded … and planning for SCI 2015 has begun

On the importance of place and time: where we’ll be, and what we’ll be doing at SCI in November

Scholarly Communications and the latent scholar