[open-humanities] Panton Fellow Introduction

Samuel Moore samuel.moore15 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 19 13:58:53 UTC 2013


Hi all,

My name is Sam Moore - I'm one of the 2013/4 Panton Fellows at the Open
Knowledge Foundation. As a Fellow, my main objective is to advocate for the
adoption of Open Data practices throughout academia, but particularly in
the humanities and social sciences. I am the first Panton Fellow to come
from a humanities background (as opposed to one from the sciences), having
previously studied philosophy, literature and now a PhD in digital
humanities/eResearch at King's College London. I wanted to post a quick
message to the list to introduce myself and my approach to Open Data.

In the sciences, as is widely known, the benefits of Open Data often focus
on replication and verification of results. However, for humanities
researchers, replication perhaps isn't the primary selling point of Open
Data. Instead, I like to think of it as one piece in the overall Open
Scholarship puzzle. Open Data could therefore be as simple as sharing one's
digitised source documents, images, etc., or linking from a research
article to a public domain version of a text. But it also refers to the
sharing of huge archives of textual corpora generated for content-mining by
digital humanists, or the data behind large projects such as the Republic
of Letters (http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/). Ultimately, Open Data
is about making research a more collaborative, rather than competitive,
process.

I am particularly interested in highlighting the benefits of Open Data in
the humanities, and so if anyone has any success stories of interesting
Open Data projects in any humanities discipline, I'd be keen to hear them.
In fact, to kickstart a discussion, I would be interested to hear the
working group's response to the question:

*What does open humanities research data mean to you and your work? *

All thoughts gratefully received!

Sam

Samuel Moore
https://twitter.com/samoore_
http://scholarlyskywritings.wordpress.com/
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