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Submit your proposal to join SCI 2018 in October – this year’s theme is Overcoming Risk

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[ Note: the due date for proposals for SCI 2018 has passed. Submitted proposals are currently being reviewed, and information about the teams that are being invited to attend SCI in October will be posted here in June. Keep an eye on this web site in January 2019 for announcement of the theme and request for proposals for 2019. ]

The Scholarly Communication Institute invites you to participate in SCI 2018, its fifth year in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region. This year’s theme will be “Overcoming Risk” and the program will take place October 7 through 11, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Triangle SCI is not your typical academic conference – it’s four days of concentrated but relaxed time with a diverse cohort of individuals who have come to start new projects they have proposed, in teams they have built and with advice and contributions from participants on other teams and a set of interlocutors and experts who work across teams.

You set the agenda, and you define the deliverables – TriangleSCI provides the scaffolding for your team to develop its project. If your team’s proposal is selected, SCI will cover all the costs for team members to participate, including travel, meals, and accommodations, including for international participants. For more information about how TriangleSCI works, see the FAQ and links from previous years of SCI.

Probably the best way to get a sense of what it’s like is through the words of participants from past years: they have described TriangleSCI as “One of the best scholarly experiences I’ve had.” and “an amazing incubator of ideas, innovation and collaboration. Grateful to be a part of this incredible experience!” Learn more about TriangleSCI from the perspective of participants via this podcast (with transcript), this summary blog post, and other links, notes, and photos from SCI 2017 and previous years.

Scrabble tiles reading "RISK" This year’s theme is Overcoming Risk, described this way in the page about the theme:

All change involves some risk. One of the reasons why we develop and stick to patterns over time, in scholarly communication as well as almost any human endeavor, is to mitigate risk. Once you know how it’s done, and you know that everyone is doing it that way, it reduces the risk for you, makes the process more efficient, and allows you to get to the core goals with less worry about the process.

Or does it?

When examined more closely, it becomes clear that existing patterns may protect some participants from risk, but not everyone. Some people may be inhibited from participating at all because the barriers to entry are too high, or the costs and risks to them, personally or professionally, seem insurmountable. Sometimes potentially desirable changes are blocked by precedent that there’s no longer a good reason for. Sometimes vested interests are just too strong, and the costs and risks of getting past them are just too high.

What strategies can scholars, universities, funding agencies, libraries, publishers and others use to promote positive change in scholarly communications, and overcome these risks and disincentives? How do we help all participants to accurately calibrate the true level of risk, so they are not inhibited from action by undue fear? What support structures can we put in place to reduce the real risks to those whose voices are underrepresented or suppressed, or whose status may be precarious – to help them feel welcome and be safe, and promote a greater diversity of perspectives and equitable access and treatment for all who are willing to engage?

What funding models and infrastructures might help new scholarly communication techniques emerge, thrive, and be sustained over time? What strategies can be employed to protect against the risk of vendor lock-in, or corporate capture of essential infrastructure and content? How can scholarly communications practices encourage speed and openness, while avoiding the risk of ephemerality? What models or practices could be developed to incentivize and reward innovation and broader public engagement, and reduce the risk to those who are seen to be breaking from traditional modes of professional advancement?

Please see the theme page for more information, including some ideas of who you might bring together to form a team, and questions you might address – we’re looking for a broad and diverse set of perspectives, and teams that will address both specific and general problems and opportunities. This is a great opportunity to launch a new project, have some concentrated time to develop an existing project with a broader set of collaborators, or just to begin to explore and experiment with ideas that are difficult to pursue in your usual work context.

Typewriter photoTo participate, form a team of 4 to 6 people, and submit a proposal along the lines of what’s described in the RFP (submission deadline is April 23, 2018).

If you have questions about any of this that aren’t already answered in the FAQ, please contact scholcomm-institute@duke.edu and we’d be glad to help.

 

 

Thanks as always to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for continuing to provide funding for the Triangle SCI and making all of this possible!

[ Photo by Mikito Tateisi on Unsplash used under Unsplash free license. ]

SCI 2017 has concluded – join us in 2018!

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The 2017 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute concluded a few weeks ago, but it’s really more of a beginning than an ending. In addition to having four days together to work on projects imagined in the proposal process many months ago, participants in SCI concluded our time together feeling like we had forged a community. As Jeana Jorgensen wrote in her #TriangleSCI 2017 Wrap-Up blog post:

One unexpected benefit is that I now feel like I’m part of a cohort, not just with my team (who are AMAZING) but also with all the scholars in attendance. I follow a lot of them on Twitter now, and I’m invested in their work. Just now I saw that one of my colleagues liked a tweet of mine from the conference hashtag, and it filled my heart to know that someone’s cheering for my progress.

I might wager that scholarly community is just as important as scholarly communication; not only do we need to communicate with one another (and the public) for our work to have any real meaning, but we also need to have that sense of belonging, of camaraderie, to help situate us in the world. We need to know that there are others who care passionately about the same materials and methods we do, who are committed to researching and teaching them. It makes the grind of institutional (or altac) life feel a little less lonely.

It’s difficult to convey what TriangleSCI is like, since it’s so different from traditional academic conferences, and so focused on fostering collaboration and community. So the best way to get a sense of the SCI experience is to see it from the perspective of the participants. Many of us were active on Twitter throughout the program, and highlights of that activity have been collected in this Storify thread. If you scroll through here you’ll be able to get a sense of the people in the room, the conversations we were having, the engagement with people out on the net, and the food, drink, and fun that were part of the whole experience. The Storify has photos, and a sampler slide show is also included below.

Some participants have already set up web sites for their projects, blogged about their experience, and written an article for Inside Higher Ed. Here are some links where you can read more from their perspective:

Part of the TriangleSCI experience is excursions in the evenings to the neighboring universities and cities for walking tours and dinners in local restaurants, and on one night, a visit to the National Humanities Center, tucked into the woods in Research Triangle Park. On that evening, we eat and drink and talk with colleagues from the Humanities Center, local universities, and the broader community. The remarks given that evening by Josh Sosin, a member of the TriangleSCI advisory board, convey what the National Humanities Center and the Scholarly Communication Institute are about. Here’s a transcript provided by Josh:

At this year’s SCI dinner at the NHC I had the honor of addressing SCI participants, NHC staff and fellows, SCI Advisory Board members, local worthies, and the crew of deer and squirrels who must wonder what takes place in the strange glass temple in their woods. Paolo thought it might be nice to put my comments down ‘on paper’ for the blog. Here goes.

<story>Thanks, it’s always a joy to have dinner here at the NHC. I like dinner. When I was a kid dinner at our house was usually a three-hour affair, and raucous. My friend James used to love to come eat with us. “I love coming to dinner at your house,” he’d say; “your family is always fighting.” “James, James,” I’d say; “that’s not fighting. That’s spirited debate.”

It was true. Dinner was where ideas happened, where we shared with each other our daily triumphs and failures, tested out ways to be in the world, discovered listening and empathy. Dinner was where we fashioned community by talking like one.

This year’s SCI is about storytelling in scholarly communication. The subject is powerfully interesting by itself, but especially so in an intellectual community that often privileges doing and making and building, over talking and deciding. So, this year’s SCI is like being back at the dinner table.

My job tonight is to say something relevant to the SCI. I am terrible at following instructions. So, I prepared a few words about the NHC, where I was fortunate to have been a fellow a few years ago. I’ll mention a few qualities of the place that I really valued.

First, the freedom from deliverables. But we have to come back to this, because this isn’t quite the truth.

Next, the freedom from distraction. But, you know, that’s not quite right either. Really, it’s the freedom to choose your distractions.

And there is a rich menu of choice here because another quality of the NHC is diversity. Each year the NHC brings together around 35 Fellows from a wide range of places, levels of seniority, institutions, disciplines, and scholarly dispositions, and puts them here, in this beautiful spot in the woods.

Not just a menu of distractions, but a venue too. Here. The room where we sit. Where during the day, every day, the Fellows gather for lunch, seek respite from their own minds, road test ideas with others, sit with peers and learn some of the ways in which the world is quite a lot bigger than the corners that they inhabit.

It is great. I loved it. Look around. The space is great; but, you know, I have space now. The freedom from distractions is awesome, but I do shut my office door sometimes. The room to have ideas is fantastic, but even now I still manage to have ideas at work. But what I realize I don’t have now, and haven’t probably since college, is the regular, ready-made opportunity to sit round the table with a rotating group of colleagues, a kind of professional ‘family’ whom I did not choose but in whose company a person can grow and thrive, sharing a meal, day after day. That is magical.

And there’s a tempo to the day here. Colleagues trickle in, share a morning coffee, maybe read the paper, retreat to their offices, pop out occasionally to see what lunch smells like, chat a bit, return to their offices, emerge to share lunch with new people, return again to their offices, pop out to the kitchen for afternoon chat over leftover desert, get back to work; then drinks and discussion in the evening. It’s like being at home, in the kitchen, at the dining table.

And if you know anything about the Triangle SCI you know that it breathes the same air, shares the same life-force as the NHC. Diverse teams of people come together in the woods, with no required deliverable (again, this is not true…we’ll return to it); there’s a shifting terrain of venues—now we’re all in one room, now in groups, cross-pollinators jumping from one team to another—a rich menu of distractions, smart people to chat with, beautiful spaces to walk in. And above all: a steady, relentless, crashing  torrent of food. Opportunities to sit and eat, stand and eat, walk and eat, talk and eat. And then eat some more.

At first I thought all that food was just the kind of extravagance one expects from a professional conference center. But whatever the cause, I am convinced that it is central to the SCI mission. It fills the dinner table around which we talk and think, build ideas, and become a community.

Let me explain the two small lies I told a minute ago, that there are no required deliverables at the NHC and SCI. For, these two programs share another crucial quality: the key deliverable is the process itself, the process of talking and doing, of nurturing collaboration and conviviality (and returning to your home community ready to do the same). And that too is an essential kind of scholarly communication, one rooted in process, community, shared commitments and habits of mind.

And this kind of communication is also a kind of doing, maybe even the most important kind of doing. My friend James and I aren’t really in touch. His profession is fighting and teaching others to do the same; he is a mixed martial arts trainer. He’s a nice guy, a great guy, but I can’t help thinking that he didn’t have enough of the right kind of dinner. The right kind of meals. The right kind of environment in which people understand that talking together is how we decide what we value, how to be in the world, how we fashion community. And surely that is the wider goal of both the NHC and Triangle SCI.</story>

Planning is already underway for SCI 2018. If you’d like to propose a project, build a team, and join this community next year, look for the new Request for Proposals to be announced in January here at trianglesci.org, on Twitter @TriangleSCI and #TriangleSCI, and in lots of other places. SCI 2018 will take place October 7-11, 2018. If your proposal is selected, the Institute will cover all expenses for your team to attend, with funding generously provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

To learn more about TriangleSCI, see our About TriangleSCI and FAQ pages.

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Photo by Joseph Barrientos

Everyone loves a good story

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When the TriangleSCI Advisory Board met last year to plan the theme for SCI 2017, the idea of “scholarly storytelling” quickly emerged as a favorite. In academia we’ve developed practices over centuries for how scholarship should be communicated, mainly with peer scholars in mind, and full of signifiers that only knowing readers will understand. We even sometimes look disparagingly upon attempts to write for and engage with a more “popular” audience, forgetting that scholarly communication doesn’t mean only communicating with other scholars. Humans are “storytelling animals”, and narrative forms have the potential to engage broader and more diverse audiences, and to help activate scholarship in different ways.

So for this year’s Scholarly Communication Institute, we invited teams to think about the potential for using storytelling techniques in their scholarly practices, and to put together projects that attempt to answer questions like these:

  • When much of the public gets information (and misinformation) from sources that already use narrative forms, and base their understanding of the world on the stories they learn in this way, how can scholars break through to help facts and nuanced perspectives to take hold?
  • Can we expand our understanding of “scholarly communication” to include narrative methods that may be better able to reach more diverse audiences, and to engage them as stakeholders and not just recipients of information?
  • How might academics use storytelling to build bridges with constituencies that normally don’t feel connected to universities, and who may even feel antipathy to them?
  • How could new technologies be used to engage broader publics in deeper ways?
  • How can scholars use the storytelling techniques of fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, visual artists, musicians, and game designers to effectively and accurately convey scholarly information?
  • What can be done to prevent this from being perceived as simply diluting the authoritativeness of complex research?
  • How do we know when we’ve crossed the boundary from information to persuasion? When is crossing that boundary a bad thing, and when is it a useful thing?
  • Can we diversify the ecosystem of scholarly communication without disrupting constructive symbiosis?

Many teams submitted proposals, and six were invited to attend the Institute in November, at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. You can read about their projects here, and follow along and join the conversation using the #TriangleSCI hashtag. In November the SCI 2017 cohort will be creating their own stories, and we’ll share them here as they emerge.

[Photo by Joseph Barrientos used under Unsplash free license]