Implementing New Knowledge Environments Research Articles

Where Lie the Similarities and Differences?: A Comparison of University and Industry Partners in Collaboration

University–industry partnerships are common on the science side of campus where ways to work together are well understood. This is less so in the humanities even as these types of collaborations are being funded by granting agencies and governments. For these partnerships to build a foundation for success, common understandings around issues of the nature of collaboration, benefits, challenges, measures of success and outcomes need to exist. Using Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) as a study case, this research examines a humanities-based partnership to understand similarities and differences in partners’ perspectives around these factors. Overall, the university and industry partners have common understandings of the nature of collaboration, the potential challenges facing the collaboration, and desired outcomes and success factors. However, there are some differences that must be navigated to ensure collaboration success. These focus on the benefits, the role of industry partners, need for tenure and promotion for researchers, and the type of resources that each can provide. While the partnership is in early stages of research, it has had the opportunity to learn about each other and differing perspectives by working and meeting together for over five years. This is the first step to creating a foundation of trust upon which a successful collaboration can be built.

Modelling Open Social Scholarship Within the INKE Community

Given the current state of digital technology, there is a clear opportunity to revamp scholarly communication into a multi-faceted, open system that integrates and takes advantage of the near-ubiquitous global network. In doing so, the values of collaboration, sharing, and transparency inherent to open social scholarship can be integrated into knowledge dissemination methods. The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) community is currently organized around the idea of open social scholarship, but putting this into practice will involve assessing and revising INKE’s own scholarly communication processes. In this paper, we explore the current state of open access to academic research and ruminate on next steps, beyond open access. We consider the role of collaboration in contemporary academic practice, and the importance of transparency in regards to multiplayer work. Further, we examine the standard scholarly communication model, especially as it pertains to INKE. Finally, we make recommendations and suggest alternatives for transforming our stock scholarly communication models into open social scholarship practices.

The Initial Impact of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory

In September 2016, members of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership—a broad, diverse group working to advance understanding of, and resolve critical issues in, the production, distribution and widespread engagement of digital scholarship in Canada and beyond—met to discuss future directions and focus areas. One of the resulting initiatives is the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory. The Open Scholarship Policy Observatory tracks national and international policies and policy changes in order to assist INKE partners with developing timely and responsive policies. This paper describes the development of the initiative, and reports on the initial impacts the project has had to date.

Introduction, <i>Beyond Open: Implementing Social Scholarship</i>

On January 10–11 2018 the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership held Beyond Open: Implementing Social Scholarship, a gathering that brought ~60 researchers, students, librarians, and academic-aligned groups together on the topics of scholarly communication, open access, and community engagement. This special issue is a snapshot of the event proceedings, organized around open social scholarship theory, infrastructure, and projects. Wide-ranging in content, the authors included here all come together under the banner of imagining more social, community-minded applications for academic work.

Introduction, New Knowledge Models: Sustaining Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Production

On January 19th-20th 2016, researchers, students, librarians, and other participants came together for the third annual Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE)-hosted gathering in Whistler, BC, Canada, for “New Knowledge Models: Sustaining Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Production.” Thematically, discussions revolved around the many facets of digital scholarship: creativity, implementation, institutional interface, opportunities, challenges, audience, initiatives, sustainability, and more. We provide a conceptual overview of the gathering, and the papers presented there that are now included in these proceedings.

“INKE-cubating” Research Networks, Projects, and Partnerships: Reflections on INKE’s Fifth Year

Humanists are participating in collaborations with others in the academy and beyond to explore increasingly complex research questions with technologically oriented methodologies and access to advice, mentoring, technology, knowledge, and funds. Although these projects have clear benefits for all those involved, these collaborations are not without their challenges. Such styles of partnership tend to be more common on the science side of campus. As a result, little is understood about the ways that they might work within the humanities and the range of benefits that can be available to members within a mature collaboration. To this end, this paper will examine the experiences of Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) as a mature, large-scale collaboration working with academic and non-academic partners and will provide some insight into best practices.

From Technical Standards to Research Communities: Implementing New Knowledge Environments Gatherings, Sydney 2014 and Whistler 2015

On December 8, 2014, researchers, students, librarians, and other participants gathered together in Sydney, Australia at the State Library of New South Wales for the 7th annual Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Birds-of-a-Feather conference, “Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age.” On January 27 and 28, 2015, a similar group of stakeholders met in Whistler, BC, Canada, at the Nita Lake Lodge for the second year to discuss “Sustaining Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Production.” The events were hosted by INKE and sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Drawing from these two gatherings, the articles collected in this latest issue of Scholarly and Research Communication reflect an ongoing conversation in SRC (see 5.4), on new ways humanities researchers, publishers, and policy makers can collaborate effectively to make the most of the new affordances of computational tools and methods.

Research Collaboration as “Layers of Engagement”: INKE in Year Four

Many academic teams and granting agencies undergo a process of reflection at a project’s completion to understand lessons learned and develop best practice guidelines. These reviews focus on the actual research work accomplished with little discussion of the relationships and processes involved. As a result, some hard-earned lessons are forgotten or minimized. To address, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project provides an opportunity to explore the changing nature of collaboration over a long-term project’s life. Now at the fourth year, team members reflect on the deepening and strengthening collaboration, with layers of engagement between the various individuals and sub-research areas, which has translated into productivity and external validation of the collaboration and its work. The article concludes with recommendations for other teams.

Humanities Scholarship in a Vast Universe: Modelling integrated scholarly opportunities between scales of digital information and meaning

Imagine a Google Earth-like opportunity to move between the “street view” of a close reading environment through aerial views of the inferences, influences, and dynamic constructions that emerge from the routes that grow up around a text, to satellite views of larger, constellated fields of contextual data. What kinds of scholarship and scholarly communication would such an environment enable? How would the inclusion of mapping and terraforming tools (that parallel the functions demonstrated in a game like Minecraft, or within Outerra’s impressive planetary mapping demo and sandbox prototype) encourage further occupation and influence? The Modelling and Prototyping group at INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) is working to engage with such possibility spaces in an effort to address these questions.

Introduction, Cuba Conference: Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: E/Merging Reading, Writing, and Research Practices

The fourth of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) “Birds of a Feather” gatherings took place between December 11 and 14, 2012, and included Cuban academic site visits to the National Library and the Casa de las Américas, one of the most preeminent publishers in Latin America. In addition to exploring opportunities for partnership and collaboration in the Americas through unconference discussions, at the conference, the group shared work centred around the digital scholarly edition through the Birds of a Feather structured presentation and discussion.

Documenting Subjective Interpretations of Illustrated Book Covers for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, our primary focus of attention has been on text. In this paper, we discuss our recent innovations in finding ways to capture the subjective interpretation of visual information that has in some way been connected with texts. Previous work has focused on test-based semantic differentials, but our current project extends beyond to triads, and beyond text-based difference poles to image-based difference poles. As our case study, we apply the method to illustrated book covers for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

In 2012-2013 a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), University of Victoria, in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of social knowledge creation. The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the iNKE team and well beyond, iincluding at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013).

Responding to Change and Transition in INKE’s Year 3

Use of project teams is increasing, however little is known about collaboration as it actually occurs over the life of projects. This paper explores the nature of collaboration within Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) after three years of funded research. The third year is characterized by change and transition with new team members, partners, and sub-research areas. INKE continues to draw upon structures and processes, including team building activities, in-person meetings, multiple communication channels, evolving governance documents to support the collaboration, and incorporating collaboration-ready individuals. The paper concludes with recommendations for similar long term, large-scale project teams.

The Beginning, The Middle, and The End: New Tools for the Scholarly Edition

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment but in a print edition would be sufficiently more difficult as to be prohibitive. We therefore offer these experimental prototypes as a collection of new affordances for the scholarly edition, although they may reasonably be extended, with some variation, to other kinds of digital text.

Firing on all cylinders: Progress and Transition in INKE’s Year 2

Use of project teams is increasing; however little is known about collaboration as it actually occurs over project’s life. This paper explores nature of collaboration within Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) after two years of funded research. The second year is characterized by forward research progress, positive relationships, and transitions and challenges related to human resources, team restructuring and partner institutional policies. INKE is drawing upon structures and processes, including in-person meetings, multiple communication channels and evolving governance documents to support the collaboration. The paper concludes with recommendations for similar long term, large-scale project team.

Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Year One Research Foundations

In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.

INKE Administrative Structure: Omnibus Document

This document reflects the distributed administrative structure to be put into practice by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) group for the purpose of governing itself as it carries out work on its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI)-funded initiative. The INKE group consists of academic researchers, academic research partners (many invested as stakeholders as well), an international advisory board, a partners committee, individual research area groups (RAG) each with their own (co)leads who act as administrators for the group and form the overall RAG administrative group committee, and an executive committee (EC) that represents all areas of activity in the research endeavour and also includes an administrative/ management advisor (who carries out work and provides leadership on process, not research content) and a project manager. Taken as a whole, the structure of the group is an embodiment of the distributed administrative and authoritative principles that have evolved over the several years of the project's foundation, and the materials that follow have been assembled and authored by the entirety of the administrative team in that spirit. This document is also closely aligned with the processes outlined in two related documents: the annual calendar and the annual RAG planning process.

Codex Ultor: Toward a Conceptual and Theoretical Foundation for New Research on Books and Knowledge Environments

In this paper, we present the conceptual and theoretical foundations for work undertaken by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. In this piece, we discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance.