Scholarship

There are different interpretations as to what constitutes ‘scholarship’ and different methods for representing it. For example, is scholarship best expressed as a set of actions that are common to all disciplines, or is it best viewed as the outputs it produces? Are all practices of equal significance? Are there commonalities across all disciplines? Research on the nature of scholarship has sought to answer these questions, and from this work we can then begin to consider how practices may be changing. The term digital scholarship has gained some currency recently, but the definitions of this are also varied.

Before we consider definitions of digital scholarship, we should look at concepts of scholarship which they build upon. Unsworth (2000) suggested seven ‘scholarly primitives’. His work was focused around humanities, but he argues that

Primitives refer to some basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation … These primitives are the irreducible currency of scholarship, so it should, in principal, be possible to exchange them across all manner of boundaries of type or token. (Unsworth 2000)

His list of primitives is as follows:

1. discovering – knowledge either through archives or research;

2. annotating – adding layers of interpretation;

3. comparing – for example, texts across languages, data sets;

4. referring – referencing and acknowledging;

5. sampling – selecting appropriate samples;

6. illustrating – clarifying, elucidating, explaining; and

7. representing – publishing or communicating.

Palmer, Teffeau and Pirmann (2009) build on this work to suggest an activity-centric categorisation of five key tasks: searching, collecting, reading, writing and collaborating, which they then subdivide. This further division reveals differences between the humanities and science disciplines; for example, searching is subdivided into browsing, which ‘tends to be open ended with the searcher looking through a body of assembled or accessible information’, and direct searching, which ‘occurs when a scholar has a well-defined goal. For example, they may be looking for information on a particular chemical compound or trying to find a particular journal article’. They suggest that browsing is more prevalent in the humanities, while direct searching is more relevant to science.

Probably the most influential work on scholarship in recent years is that of Ernest Boyer. Using data gathered from more than 5,000 faculty members, Boyer (1990) classified the types of activities scholars regularly engaged in. This was partly a response to the research versus teaching conflict, with recruitment and promotion often being based on research activity, while it is teaching that is significant to most students and to more than 70 per cent of faculty. The report sought to place all scholarly activity on an equal footing: ‘What we urgently need today is a more inclusive view of what it means to be a scholar – a recognition that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching’ (Boyer 1990: 24).

In Boyer's definition of scholarship, there are four components, each of which, he suggests, should be considered as of equal value by universities and government policy.

• Discovery – This is the creation of new knowledge in a specific area or discipline. This is often taken to be synonymous with research. This is probably closest to the public conception of scholarship, as universities are often the site of significant breakthroughs.

• Integration – This is focused on interpretation and interdisciplinary work. It is moving away from the pure, ‘genesis’ research of discovery. Boyer states that it is ‘making connections across the disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating non-specialists’.

• Application – This is related to the concept of service, but Boyer makes a distinction between citizenship and scholarly types of service, and for the latter it needs to build on the scholar's area of expertise. It can be seen as engagement with the wider world outside academia, which might include public engagement activities as well as input into policy and general media discussions. This can also include the time spent peer-reviewing journal articles and grant applications and sitting on various committees.

• Teaching – Much of the interpretation of Boyer can be seen as an attempt to raise the profile of teaching. He argues that ‘the work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. Yet, today, teaching is often viewed as a routine function, tacked on’.

Boyer's work was influential and many universities sought to implement reward and development schemes based on his four activities. It is not without criticism, however, in that it focuses on the individual scholar and is therefore biased towards the humanities, where there is a higher incidence of lone scholars and a culture of ‘possessive individualism’ (Rosenzweig 2007). It may be less applicable in the sciences, which are characterised by large-scale, capital intensive collaborations (Galison and Hevly 1992).

However, as a basis for examining changes in scholarly practice, it is well established and captures the range of scholarly activity sufficiently for the broad impact of new technologies to be seen. Subsequent chapters will look at each of Boyer's activities in more detail and outline how some practices are changing and what the possible implications are.

Digital scholarship revisited

The term ‘digital scholarship’ can be viewed as a convenient shorthand to contrast with traditional, ‘analogue’ forms of scholarship, although as set out in Chapter 1, ‘digital’ is only one aspect of a trilogy, the convergence of which makes for significant change. Digital scholarship itself has differing interpretations, in one flavour it refers to the curation and collection of digital resources, which places it in the information sciences, whereas others use it in a broader sense to cover a range of scholarly activities afforded by new technologies. It is this more wide-ranging interpretation that is the focus of this book.

As the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences observes, there are multiple interpretations of digital scholarship.

In recent practice, ‘digital scholarship’ has meant several related things:

1. building a digital collection of information for further study and analysis,

2. creating appropriate tools for collection building,

3. creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study of collections,

4. using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new intellectual products, and

5. creating authoring tools for these new intellectual products, either in traditional form or in digital form (http://www.cnx.org/content/m14163/latest/).

Christine Borgman (2007) discusses digital scholarship with a focus on data and somewhat addresses the humanities bias in Boyer's work by emphasising the significance of teams: ‘The internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data and information-intensive collaborative research’.

Borgman argues that the sharing of data and data itself constitute knowledge capital, comparable with published articles. This tension between Borgman and Boyer may indicate that there is no one interpretation of digital scholarship that encompasses all disciplines, as the work of Palmer et al. suggests. Similarly Fry (2004) suggests that the adoption of technology will follow different patterns in disciplines: ‘[academic] fields that have a highly politicized and tightly controlled research culture will develop a coherent field-based strategy for the uptake and use of ICTs, whereas domains that are pluralistic and have a loosely organized research culture will appropriate ICTs in an ad-hoc localized manner’.

Borgman's focus is on developing an information infrastructure that will facilitate the exchange of data and scholarly activity. She suggests that ‘[p]reservation and management of digital content are probably the most difficult challenges to be addressed in building an advanced information infrastructure for scholarly applications’.

While preservation and management are undoubtedly important, the focus of this book is on changes in the practice of scholars, particularly in how they communicate, the types of outputs they produce and the networks they operate within. As proposed in Chapter 1, it is the ‘fast, cheap and out of control’ technologies that perhaps have the greatest impact on scholarly practice. These are often tools produced outside of education, and their ease of use encourages innovation and exploration. Much of the digital scholarship work is centred on the curation and preservation of digital artefacts or the digitisation of content. The sort of changes we are seeing around open access publishing, development of blog communities, use of Twitter at conferences and easy sharing of content are driven not just by their digital nature but by the convergence of the three characteristics of digital, networked and open.

Before exploring the impact of such approaches on each of Boyer's four functions in subsequent chapters, the remainder of this chapter will provide some brief indicative examples of changes in them.

Conclusion

It is clear from the preceding discussion that new technologies hold out very real possibilities for change across all facets of scholarship. In each case these afford the possibility for new, more open ways of working. Academic work has always contained a significant element of collaboration within academia, but now it is increasingly easy to collaborate with more colleagues within, and also beyond the academy, and for the varied products of these collaborations to be available to the widest possible audience. This reflects the kind of permeable boundaries seen in other sectors, as a result of digital network technologies.

In Chapter 3 the impact of digital and network technologies on other sectors was examined, but it is the third element of openness that is perhaps more significant for scholarship. Digital scholarship is more than just using information and communication technologies to research, teach and collaborate; it also includes embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking and wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society.

The term ‘open scholar’ has also been used by some and can be seen as almost synonymous with digital scholar. The open scholar ‘is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it – at any stage of its development’ (Burton 2009). This is a significant and challenging step for scholars, especially when faced with norms and values which oppose, hinder or fail to recognise these forms of scholarship.

Chapter 5 to Chapter 8 will address each of Boyer's scholarly functions in turn. For each one I have selected just one perspective to demonstrate the possible impact of digital, networked, open approaches, which is not to suggest that this is the only, or even the most significant, impact but rather as illustrative of the potential changes and the issues.