For our last question, I would like to ask you to consider the act of publication for this blog carnival. How could we best capture the interplay, the multimedia experience of blogging as a more formalized publication? What would be the best outcome for this collection of insights from archaeological bloggers?
On the surface this may seem like a simple question. In actuality it really is not! The act of publication, as it is traditionalyl conceived, would go against the very virtues of blogging that many in this carnival have been rallying around: flexibility, informality, and dialog. And yet, I feel this experience has been a unique one that warrants some kind of formal and creative documentation.
There are, of course, the usual (?) digital archaeological data repositories like Digital Antiquity and Archaeological Data Service. However, to my knowledge, these repositories do not cater to the looser examples of "data sets" and records that short form/blogging and other aspects of the web, like social media, represent.
Overall I think Open Context might be a productive avenue to pursue for documenting the carnival as it focuses on pooling primary documentation of archaeological and related research-- information that rarely sees conventional publication. As stated on their website, "Open Context's technologies focus on ease of use, open licensing frameworks, informal data integration and, most importantly, data portability." In my opinion, this fits perfectly within our flexible, informal, but networked blog carnival.
A final note: Eric informed me recently (and I hope he will forgive me for sharing so publicly) that plans are in the works to have the California Digital Library archive data from aggregated RSS feeds from Open Context (and perhaps other sites in the future?). While this project is still in its infant stages, and therefore not useful for our immediate documentation needs, it is exciting to think that if this idea spreads beyond UC, perhaps one day your rambling posts could end up automatically archived on a progressive digital library system! In that case, better mind your typos...
It's all about the cloud, now. So whatever you do be sure to call it "Arcloudeology".
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree that blogging is a really important aspect of scholarly communications, and scholars (not necessarily just those in universities, but anyone contributing as a public intellectual) needs support for digital preservation.
ReplyDeleteJust to reiterate the point of this post, Open Context, itself, is not a digital repository, and can’t archive blog content. But as you point out in this post, it does rely upon the archival support / services of the California Digital Library. Their model of preservation "micro-services" is something that I think is absolutely essential for the kind of distributed scholarly production that is exemplified by this blogging carnival that Colleen Morgan organized. (We’re facing similar issues with the DDIG session that has papers posted in Visible Past).
Researchers have lots of publication channels and develop and curate many different online collections, especially as the Web becomes a more central part of scholarly communications. Open Context is just one of many (and I’m working hard to make sure it plays nicely with others!) places serving scholarly content . We’re excited by CDL’s work to develop feed-based ingest of content, since lots of content management systems (including blogs) already make feeds. This would allow academics to control their own publication platforms, while streamlining support from a major institutional repository.
I haven’t thought too much in detail if feed-based accession is the best way to preserve the blogging carnival. One other approach, that also works nicely with the sprawling and distributed nature of the Web, is Zotero. The plans(?) / project to hook up with the Internet Archive is another excellent approach to this problem (see: http://www.dancohen.org/2007/12/12/zotero-and-the-internet-archive-join-forces/).
Digital archiving is hard, requires big institutional muscle and commitment, and is beyond the capabilities of most research units or individual scholars. This discussion highlights how archives need to support the distributed nature of scholarly communications and not just the preservation of a few centrally managed institutional collections.
Thank you Susan and especially Eric, for your thoughtful comments. Thank you also for clarifying that Open Context is not presently set up to archive blogs or other feed content, but this possibility is on the horizon. I am curious to see what other participants in this carnival suggest since, as you say, digital archiving is difficult and mostly beyond the capabilities of individual scholars.
ReplyDeleteThe only other option that popped into my mind is Omeka as a web publishing tool. Each question from the carnival could be a "collection" that links to all the networks of responses as items. These could be mapped spatially using the Geolocation plugin. Enabling comments (via Disqus or other equivalent) would encourage participants to continue dialog on individual items.
This, of course, would have been best to set up before the carnival, so there would be leg-work involved in documenting and inputting all the items (i.e., blog posts and comments) after the fact.