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Category: knowledge production

On “Zonas de Contacto: A Digital Humanities Ecology of Knowledges,” by Élika Ortega

On “Zonas de Contacto: A Digital Humanities Ecology of Knowledges,” by Élika Ortega

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In “Zonas de Contacto: A Digital Humanities Ecology of Knowledges,” Élika Ortega considers the field of digital humanities and its concentration of English-language work and output. She argues that the purposeful facilitation of zones of contact between practitioners from different regions who work in different languages would support a more diverse ecology of knowledges for the field. Ortega examines the efforts made by groups like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations to encourage multilingual engagement but concludes that these efforts…

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On Living Books by Janneke Adema

On Living Books by Janneke Adema

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Janneke Adema considers the contemporary scholarly book and how it could transition from a fixed, bound object to a more fluid and evolving entity. She argues that humanities scholars should reconsider their role as authors and strive to engage with knowledge production in more open, critical, and experimental ways. Adema challenges new media scholars (such as Lev Manovich and John Bryant) and print historians (such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns) for their perpetuation of the book as an unchangeable,…

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On “Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon” by Thomas Herve Mboa Nkoudou

On “Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon” by Thomas Herve Mboa Nkoudou

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Thomas Herve Mboa Nkoudou considers how the Open Access movement has played out on the African continent, with specific focus on sub-Saharan countries. He argues that open access is not necessarily an unfettered good in these regions, unlike the popular social good / equalizing / emancipatory qualities many open access advocates have claimed for years. Rather, Nkoudou suggests, open access has increased access to western research and heralded in profit-making strategies like Article Processing Charges that have further excluded researchers…

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On Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

On Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

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Data Feminism casts a feminist perspective on data science. The book is organized around a set of principles intended to show and do feminist data work: Examine power; Challenge power; Elevate emotion and embodiment; Rethink binaries and hierarchies; Embrace pluralism; Consider context; Make labour visible. D’Ignazio and Klein draw on feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical theory, and information science scholars to contest that data are “never neutral; they were always the biased output of unequal social, historical, and…

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On Reassembling Scholarly Communications by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray

On Reassembling Scholarly Communications by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray

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Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access draws together various chapters on the current and future state of scholarly communication, especially in relation to open access and open scholarship movements. Eve and Gray have incorporated perspectives from around the globe in this collection, with an emphasis on critical approaches to open scholarship endeavours and activities. For instance, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou argues that open access can be quite detrimental in Africa, where the pressure to publish…

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