Scientific communication, which concerns itself with researchers’ use of formal and informal information channels and their communicative roles, falls within the scope of PARTHENOS’ activities. One task within PARTHENOS is dedicated entirely to the evaluation of the need for the creation of a scientific e-journal in the service of e-humanities research and the possible adoption and management of a scientific repository service for open access preprint storage of scientific papers.
Impressive overview
The team that is working on this task met recently to discuss the first outcomes of the evaluation and next steps. A survey among PARTHENOS’ partners into their use of e-journals focusing on Digital Humanities had already resulted in an impressive overview. The discussion that followed showed that the existing e-journals largely filled the need for the Digital Humanities field, although smaller gaps could perhaps be found. Another aspect that has to be taken into account when deciding whether to setup an e-journal has to do with the sustainability of such an enterprise when undertaken by a project such as PARTHENOS. The outcome was that there is no immediate need to set up a new e-journal on Digital Humanities, and that for any initiative in that direction the problem of sustainability has to be answered. However it was also felt that scientific communication in the field of Digital Humanities has room for improvement, and that PARTHENOS is in a good position to take advantage of the opportunities that our digital resources provide us.
Humanities at Scale
To optimize our resources, it was agreed that a good course of action would be to look into collaboration with other Digital Humanities and research infrastructures projects. Contacts with the project Humanities at Scale (HaS) were already established and members of their team joined the meeting. Humanities at Scale is a project closely related to DARIAH. It is setup to improve DARIAH in fostering new and sustaining existing knowledge in digitally enabled research in the arts and humanities. DARIAH-ERIC coordinates HaS.
Meta blog
HaS aims to organise a platform that brings together publications that deal with all aspects of methods in the field of Digital Humanities. Their main idea is to set up a meta blog to (re)publish all types of publications, in different languages, that deal with methods in Digital Humanities. The goal is to trigger the community to describe methods in more details and to foster discussions about that area that is barely covered in the Digital Humanities literature. A prototype of the blog is currently being tested.
Digital communication space
It was proposed that PARTHENOS may become part of this initiative and contribute to the blog, and also support the organisation and sustainability. At the same time, PARTHENOS would build a digital communication space, a so-called Hub, which would meet our objectives for the Digital Humanities community. Further discussions will follow in order to explore the possibilities of such a collaboration. With this concrete outcome, the meeting on scientific communication turned out to be very successful. Watch the PARTHENOS’ website for more news on the Hub.