OpenMethods: building a collaborative knowledge hub for Digital Humanities tools and methods

The rich and dynamically evolving nature of Digital Humanities (henceforth DH) is constantly challenging and pushing the boundaries of the traditional/legacy formats of scholarly communication that are rooted in print culture. We see emerging good practices to uncover complete epistemological processes and allow others to interact with one’s scholarship in-depth, to reuse parts of it or even to build new things on top of it. Often scholars who take up these methodological and epistemological innovations also venture to employ innovative forms of scholarly communication, that offer great advantages to rapidly exchange ideas, datasets, software etc. Still, these timely exchanges often get relegated to GitHub repositories, blogs, academic Twitter, and other informal communication spaces, which remain invisible or are not accounted for by traditional research evaluation metrics and discovery systems. To change this, there is a need for a plurality of trusted discursive and discovery spaces within DH where various communities around DH can access, highlight, curate, discuss and evaluate the rich diversity of content types in a publicly maintained environment. 

The OpenMethods metablog aims to explore and deliver a solution for this and thus advance the establishment of an open research culture within DH. The OpenMethods metablog provides a convenient and easy way for DH experts from around the globe to select, propose, curate, highlight and evaluate Open Access online content. It provides a platform capable of bringing together various formats of digital publications such as blog posts, preprints, research articles or videos. The OpenMethods platform is intentionally interdisciplinary and multilingual to facilitate a timely disclosure and spread of knowledge, language diversity, and to raise peer recognition for the related research results. The group of DH experts, known as the OpenMethods Editorial Team, currently comprises 29 editors from 12 countries. 

OpenMethods has been developed in partnership with the DARIAH community as an output of the DARIAH “Humanities at Scale” project (Engelhardt et al. 2017). 

In our poster presentation, we aim to touch upon:

• How the OpenMethods platform facilitates opening up the scholarly discourses around DH to heterogeneous communities and newcomers to the field

• How the OpenMethods team propagates the culture of reuse by showcasing best practices for the adoption of existing services and their underlying software for different research environments and needs

• How OpenMethods aims to build a new, community-driven evaluation culture around both DH tools and methods and their communication practices

• How OpenMethods aims to build an informal but sufficiently diverse knowledge hub from the communities around the platform (most notably the Editorial Team) that is anchored in a range of different disciplinary and geographical contexts

• What are the challenges in appropriately rewarding our Editorial Team and Volunteers for their important contributions to the platform in particular and to DH methodology in general. 

Our presentation will allow us to solicit the widest possible feedback from DH communities. To this end, it will not only explain the aims and strategies of OpenMethods, but will also include an interactive demo. We also wish to encourage the conference attendees to join and expand the OpenMethods network, explore its potentials for advancing their own research methods and participate in the development of the platform.