In my blog post explaining scholars’ participation and practices on Twitter, I alluded to Networked Participatory Scholarship (yet another acronym!). I have mentioned this on and off over the last year and a half, but I am now happy to announce that Royce Kimmons (who recently became a doctoral candidate – woot!) and I published a paper explaining pressures that exist for educators’ and researchers’ to participate in digital scholarship and online social networks. Our work complements recent research in the field by suggesting that the rise of digital scholarship is not simply due to technological advances. Digital scholarship also relates to social and cultural pressures (e.g., scholars’ questioning scholarly artifacts, such as peer-review, and experimenting with new forms of teaching, such as open courses and MOOCs). For this reason, we prefer to think about digital scholarship in terms of practices, as “scholars’ participation in online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and otherwise develop their scholarship.”

Here’s the abstract:

We examine the relationship between scholarly practice and participatory technologies and explore how such technologies invite and reflect the emergence of a new form of scholarship that we call Networked Participatory Scholarship: scholars’ participation in online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and otherwise develop their scholarship. We discuss emergent techno-cultural pressures that may influence higher education scholars to reconsider some of the foundational principles upon which scholarship has been established due to the limitations of a pre-digital world, and delineate how scholarship itself is changing with the emergence of certain tools, social behaviors, and cultural expectations associated with participatory technologies.

We conclude by noting that, “Whether they recognize it or not, scholars are part of a complex techno-cultural system that is ever changing in response to both internal and external stimuli, including technological innovations and dominant cultural values. Though such an understanding may lead to a certain level of trepidation regarding the shape of scholarship’s uncertain future, we should take an active role in influencing the future of scholarship and establishing ourselves as productive participants in an increasingly networked and participatory world.”

A copy of the paper is also available:
Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent Techno-Cultural Pressures Toward Open and Digital Scholarship in Online Networks. Computers & Education, 58(2), 766-774.: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.10.001

Image courtesy of: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/onecm/5862945226/. Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

digital humanities digital scholar digital scholarship networked participatory scholarship open scholar open scholarship