In the conclusions, the overview and the connected discussion are wrapped up with remarks for future research and practices.
The research on Digital Scholarship: separated worlds
Digital scholarship disserved increasing interest from the research community of librarians from the beginning of 2000 along with the various transformations that library services faced through their progressive digitalization. Since the librarians had constantly collaborated with scholars in both searching scientific information as well as in cataloguing and supporting the visibility of scholarly results for career purposes, the topic was easily perceived as research problem (J. Cox,
2016; Zhao,
2014). Moreover, the Open Access movement gave an impressive input to librarianship to reflect on the own practices and services, that was immediately transferred to academics’ practices. Digital scholarship in this field was defined as
Building a digital collection of information for further study and analysis,
creating appropriate tools for collection-
building,
creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study of collections,
using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new intellectual products,
creating authoring tools for these new intellectual products,
either in traditional forms or in digital form (Palmer & Cragin,
2008, p.196). Most contributions from Information and Library sciences emphasized the problems of librarians to support scholars' understanding and use of digital textual and multimedia collections; as well as the way scholars could enhance digital infrastructures to facilitate the academic endeavour (from searching documents to collaborate with other scholars). Last, but not least, the debate focused the way scholars could adopt digital facilities provided by libraries to increase reputation (Andersen,
2003; Holliman,
2010; Quigley, Neely, Parkolap, & Groom,
2013; Zhao,
2014). This concern about infrastructures developed hand in hand with the debate on Open Access (Den Besten et al.,
2010; Suber,
2009). The need of opening up science seemed to be in transition towards the fully accessible, public and participatory concept of science in and for society, where the initial concept of eScience (e for electronic) was developing into Open Science with its impact on scholarship (Ren,
2013). Research in this field also built on
scientometrics to study power relationships, reputation and visibility of science, since the pioneering works of De Solla Price (
1963), praised by the sociologists of science Merton and Garfield, (
1986). In fact, the method showed through mathematical and statistical principles the relationships in science early studied by Merton (1942 [1979]). This important contribution was translated into the current trend analysing not only the power influences and the processes of reputation building through traditional citation networks (obtained through traditional, paid publishers and scientific databases); but also through the Open Access publications and repositories, the open web, and more recently by social media platforms, building emergent metrics or
altmetrics (Roemer & Borchardt,
2012). The altmetrics should support new reputation mechanisms for scholars (Jamali, Nicholas & Herman,
2016) and new ways of developing collaboration and trust (Jamali et al.,
2014) towards a more open and democratic concept of science and beyond “the invisible college” (a concept adopted by De Solla Price, quoted by Valente,
2003). However most debates in this area remained disconnected to a critical perspective for scientists’ professional learning to be introduced to a fair-minded digital, networked and open science. The deep debate enacted by De Solla Price went far from research exploring more or less naïve approaches to organizing and delivering digital services for scholars (in the best of cases connected to Open Access, but in most cases inevitably linked to digitalized but still traditional science).
Furthermore, the problems in this area were soundly conceptualized by Christine Borgman (
2007) in her influential book “
Scholarship in the Digital Age:
Information,
Infrastructure and the Internet”. In Borgman’s contribution, the concept of digital scholarship was in tight connection with the debate about cyberinfrastructures supporting new forms of doing research and science, namely, eResearch and eScience, with the progressive digitalization of institutional infrastructures and the expected impact on scholars’ practices to deal with information and communication processes, but went beyond these services to critically think how these cyberinfrastructures could reshape scholarly practices and production. Borgman’s work doubtlessly arose from the deep-rooted information science field. However, she was critical with regard to the risks of technological determinism, namely, thinking of technological platforms as the only influencers of human behaviour and organizational change. The sociotechnical studies played a highly important role in this case (Borgman,
2007, p.42-43) by pushing her in an opposite, new direction with regard to the information sciences trend (analyzing infrastructure’s building and the users’ experiences within them). As Borgman explained:
Librarianship tends to focus on methods of constructing organizational tools that reflect the world in the most authoritative manner,
while recognizing that no organizational tool is static. Rather,
it must be updated continuously, via
consensus process,
to maintain its currency and relevance. Sociotechnical studies,
in contrast,
tend to focus on how these representational tools construct the world,
and how they both facilitate and constrain behavior (Borgman,
2007, p.43). She accomplished, in this sense, a first effort in a cross-disciplinary direction, bridging the debate on cyberinfrastructures with professional practice and institutional development.
In sum, the evolution of research in this field went in the direction of analysing the affordances and usage of cyberinfrastructures for the research flow as part of a scientific information life cycle (Borgman,
2007, p.229; Hernon,
1994): filtering/accessing, creating/using, modifying/authoring, indexing/organizing, storing/retrieving, distributing/networking the results of research as digital objects containing scientific information, and doing so across traditional cyberinfrastructures, open access repositories or social media. However, another strand within this disciplinary field attempted to analyse how scholars build trust, collaboration and reputation studying metrics based mostly on cross-citations and surveys.
In close connection with information sciences and library studies, a second strand of research emerged within the humanities in the cross-over with digital technologies, opening to a new field of research, that of “
digital humanities”(Terras, Nyhan, & Vanhoutte,
2013). As Terras et al. pointed out
Digital Humanities as a term (…)
provides a big tent for all digital scholarship in the humanities (
2013, p.140). The scholars connected to this perspective worked intensely to define the boarders of theory and practices as a field of research (Unsworth,
2013), embraced the new forms of representation of cultural heritage, including history, arts and literature through the digital medium (Bentkowska-Kafel,
2013; Gardiner & Musto,
2015; Kaltenbrunner,
2015). Moreover, the term encompassed the debate connected to the changing research methods and required professionalism in the humanities along an interdisciplinary dialogue with digital technologies (Klein,
2015). In sum, digital humanities seemed to be at the cross-over of the debate about digital scholarship, adding its “unease” but also providing clear examples of practice of digital scholarship (Flanders,
2013).
A last strand connected to the academics’ professional learning and identity in the digital era emerged in tight connection with the educational technologies’ research, by about 2010. The interest in the matter of digital scholarship spread in this research area since scholars contributing to it were interested in the complexities of the technological uptake by institutions and the users as socio-cultural shift encompassing professional practices, the connected learning ecologies and the impacts on professional identity (Pearce et al.,
2010). Within this field the research was focused on scholars’ struggle to do (practices) and to be (identity) in the changing context of higher education. In fact, scholars’ were somehow pushed (in rather conflictive and contradictory ways) to keep the pace of innovations based on digital, open and networked contexts (Goodfellow,
2014; Scanlon,
2014; Weller,
2011). The conundrum of opening up science and education was thereby faced through the exploration of professional learning as process through which the scholar undergoes in her effort to be more open, more digital or more networked (Goodfellow,
2014). Moreover, the focus of research shifted from the objective usage of cyberinfrastructures to understand how the technological affordances might create new scenarios for practice encompassing a deontological reflection (Costa,
2014; Scanlon,
2014; Veletsianos & Kimmons,
2012b). This approach aligned indeed with socio-technical studies going beyond technological determinism (Pearce et al.,
2010).
For this group of researchers, the research problems relating Digital Scholarship were mostly connected with the adoption of unconventional cyberinfrastructures like social media to do and share research –
social scholarship- (Greenhow & Gleason,
2014; Manca & Ranieri,
2016a; Veletsianos,
2012); the collaboration between researchers to co-create content in more fluid processes of work that connect research with interdisciplinary interactions, teaching and dissemination (Garnett & Ecclesfield,
2012; Veletsianos & Kimmons,
2012a); engaging public audiences in the making of science, by extending the forms of participation along the research process (Grand, Wilkinson, Bultitude, & Winfield,
2012). The whole debate was connected to the need to improve scholars’ literacy to participate in digital, networked and open contexts of scholarship (Goodfellow & Lea,
2013; Veletsianos & Kimmons,
2012b). Moreover, in this research community it was possible to observe a strong reference to Boyer’s model (Boyer,
1990) on the academic profession. In fact, the need for reconsidering the academic profession has been an issue for research since Boyer’s “new priorities for the professoriate” in the ‘90s (Boyer, Moser, Ream, & Braxton,
2015; Teichler, Arimoto, & Cummings,
2013). Boyer pointed out that a new scholarship should be based in four functions: Discovering (creating new knowledge through research), Integration (interaction across disciplinary lines to construct new research approaches to social problems), Application (transacting with the society to use academic knowledge), Teaching (use academic knowledge to educate future generations of practitioners and scholars). Therefore, Digital Scholarship’s perspective for this group (see for example Greenhow & Gleason,
2014; Weller,
2011) showed that Boyer’s 4 dimensions were being accelerated and transformed by: a) openness in both science and the research activities, b) open learning and teaching; c) networking, as the new professional ways of collaboration across geographical and institutional frontiers based on the affordances provided by social networks and the Web 2.0. However, in spite of the interconnectedness between digitality with openness and networking, digital practices rather follow traditional schemes (Goodfellow,
2014). For Esposito (
2013), scholarly practices are caught in the middle of being digital/open or traditional, aligning this conception with the visitors/residents’ idea of using digital tools or living within digital spaces (White & Cornu, A. Le,
2011). For Costa (
2014) scholars are
reinventing themselves online along different episodes of “outcasts on the inside” for deploying professional identity as digital scholar come at a price. As she expresses “
The difference between the field and the habitus individuals bring to it leads to misrecognition of practice…
ambivalence between the university world and research participants’
intellectual journeys results is a disjoined sens of identity and predisposition to symbolic revolutions” (Costa, op.cit. 207). Moreover,
Stewart (2015) equates traditional practices to doing research in a “scarce context” whereas “…
In the process of using,
sharing,
and contributing to this abundant and ever-
renewing body of resources and ideas,
scholars become more visible to each other and their areas of interest more legible”.
With regard to the methodological approaches in this field, while there were also extensive studies covering the way scholars adopted social media through surveys (Manca & Ranieri,
2017), most studies in this field were based on qualitative methods observing and making thick descriptions and narratives on scholars’ forms of approaching open social media, particularly blogging (Kjellberg,
2014) and micro-blogging with Twitter (
Stewart, 2015; Veletsianos,
2012; Veletsianos & Kimmons,
2016). Some of these studies adopted critical and post-structural theoretical frameworks like Bourdieu’s
habitus (Costa,
2013,
2014) Foucault’s “power and technologies of the self” (Hildebrandt & Couros,
2016), or Bakhtin’s “chronotopes” (Esposito, Sangrà, & Maina,
2013) aiming at showing how transition from tradition and the science in the “ivory tower” is in open and painful contradiction with the making of the scholar’s identity as open, networked and digital.
To sum up, this research strand focused not only how the scholars behave in the digital, networked and open contexts of practice, but it worked out the tensions and contradictions that lead academics to act creatively to align values and practices within the making of their professional identity.
We must mention at this point cross-fertilization between trends. The first one regards the highly cited work of Boyer, which has been extensively adopted as model of scholarship. Almost all consulted studies in the field of educational technologies elaborate on Boyer’s model, starting from Weller’s work (
2011); a good number of papers from the information science area take into consideration this author (Raffaghelli et al.,
2016). Another author that we should recognize as “boundary crossing” is surely Borgman (
2007) whose influencial work (mentioned above) has introduced the problem of digital scholarship for information sciences but also acknowledged the socio-technical studies as another perspective explaining the creative relationship between scholars and cyerinfrastructures. Building on the concept of “literacies” for the digital university, Goodfellow, (
2013) makes Borgman (
2007) and Weller (
2011) to dialogue, in an attempt to understand the concepts emerging from these two works to define digital and academic literacies. More recently, the topic of professional identity studied in the field of educational technologies has been connected to reputation (Stewart,
2014; G. Veletsianos & Stewart,
2016); and from the side of information science studies reputational mechanisms have been analysed under the lens of Boyer’s model for professional development.
However, there are tensions that a more interdisciplinary and cohesive approach could solve. For example, the value of social media platforms to promote new forms of communicate science and of opening science in more participatory and informal ways, that is often assumed in many of the educational technologists’ works is highly contested by many groups of librarians. These lasts see social media platforms and their business models as potentially hazardous for a public and democratic science. Moreover, this last group point out the unfair competition social media (with their appealing and user-friendly interface) generate against institutional repositories as public funded and hence safer for public dissemination of science (Hall,
2015).
Wrapping up, the depicted situation let us only recognize the peak of the iceberg, understanding some of the research subtopics and problems, the methodological approaches and the disciplinary contributions within the broad issue of digital scholarship. However, the analysis of the literature in an attempt to characterize the three strands of research shows that the connections between the several perspectives are still far from come into being.
Discussion: the missed dialogue between Digital Scholarship and Faculty Development
The brief exploration of the literature on digital scholarship and faculty development conducted hitherto should establish the conditions to discuss the research question are faculty development strategies hindered by the lack of a cohesive view in the research on digital scholarship? Indeed, our exploration of the literature disclose two order of problems relating how the advancements in digital scholarship are (or could) inform professional development research and practices needed to become a digital scholar.
The first problem is that the research on faculty development to achieve digital skills for the academic profession have been mainly focused on
online teaching (McKee, Johnson, Ritchie, & Tew,
2013). In spite of the importance of open education and elearning for the movement of educational technologies, digital scholarship is a far more complex practice, as the same authors of the mentioned perspective have pointed out. Just as example, on the basis of the revisited DIAT model of Boyer, Weller (
2011) pointed out the importance of new forms of academic communication through blogging and social networks between research and teaching as two areas of practice with blurring boarders. Furthermore, the online teaching issue is almost inexistent in the first perspective on digital scholarship (information sciences), which focus is mainly research and the scientific communication to the scientific community or the wider public, as we showed earlier. Moreover, the overwhelming information about faculty development on the area of online teaching seems to be in contradiction with the fact that doing research is allegedly the primary endeavour for scholars and the main element for careers’ advancement. Seemingly, the lack of attention of faculty development to digital research skills or
discovery in Boyer’s terms could be explained by a rather pragmatic approach of professional learning where the scholars achieve the specific professional skills through highly informal activities. In fact, it is the same expertise on a research domain that guides the self-recognition of skills’ gap and the associated learning activities and resources required to fulfil the professional learning needs. The fact mentioned above are clearly underlining a clear disconnection between faculty development and digital scholarship.
The second problem goes in the opposite direction, from the research on digital scholarship to the issue of faculty development. It regards the fact that the research on the former topic has not considered yet the problem of designing, deploying and evaluating professional development towards the skills and processes required to become (act and being) a digital scholar, a focus that would bridge research on the two issues under analysis here.
As Raffaghelli, Cucchiara, Manganello, and Persico (
2015) pointed out, a close look to studies analysing digital scholarship shows that most of them are based on observational approaches that explore and observe existing practices, reporting objective data or phenomenological or narrative accounts on what it is. Moreover, most studies build on more or less acknowledged values on scholarship (towards more open and digitalized practices) but they just show a current picture and eventually point out the criticalities and conflicts of trying to be a digital scholar in the middle of traditional systems. With no interventionist studies, both experimental or design-based research that take into consideration an initial framework, device or model to be tested, it is clear that the directions for practice are uncertain. In this vein, the same authors explored a more evident question, namely “
how many studies on digital scholarship considered professional development on the topic?” The findings showed a situation where very few studies considered specific instructions for professional development (subject areas, the stage professional development (9% of studies), general approaches to adopt digital tools for research and teaching (20%) and design and testing of a model of professional development for Digital Scholarship not considered at all (71%) (Raffaghelli et al., p.14).
More recently, the studies have started to make proposals relating to frameworks of practice and eventually competence, like academic microblogging (Heap & Minocha,
2012), reputation building (Nicholas & Herman,
2016) or the adoption of open datasets as open educational resources (Atenas, Havemann, & Priego,
2015). A first comprehensive effort to build a theoretical and operational framework of competences for young researchers has been offered by Ranieri (
2014). However, her attempt was based on an initial reflection on initial training required to do research. Therefore, a comprehensive framework that analyses scholarship as lifelong learning endeavour and as professional area integrated by diversified activities beyond teaching or research and hence based on shared values and a broad vision of what being a digital scholar and practicing digital scholarship is, is still missed.
Having said this, we could now attempt to answer the second subsidiary question, how the fragmentary vision of digital scholarship influences incomplete practices in faculty development?, drafting three scenarios of faculty development for digital scholarship. In order to build the scenarios, we will inspect every perspective on digital scholarship through the four requirements for effective faculty development: the framework of competences and scenarios of expertise; the institutional strategies and policies; the environments, resources and activities and the showcase areas. We will inform every scenario with the existing (but highly fragmentary and incomplete) literature relating professional development for the perspective digital scholarship under analysis.
Three scenarios of faculty development for digital scholarship
For the first perspective (Information Sciences), the focus of digital scholarship is scientific communication, enhanced by digital technologies, and more recently, the open research practices, participatory science and new modes of disseminating the scientific work. The main theoretical model of reference to consider professionalism regards the cycle of scientific communication (Borgman,
2007) and the competent management of the workflow thereby proposed. If we take into consideration the European context, only in the recent years several proposals for training researchers to adopt more actively Open Access have increased. Several European documents address the need of
researchers’
training, that is, opportunities for formal learning on issues like Open Access, opening up science, open peer-review and open data management and publication. As a matter of fact, a complete picture of what was conceived as
digital science was presented within the concept paper
digital science at Horizon 2020 by the DG Connect (European Commission,
2013), where a vision on digital science, a conceptual framework and a number of operational dimensions guiding also researchers’ training were considered. Moreover, the communication of the European Commission (COM
2016 178 final) on the new European cyberinfrastructures supporting science highlights that necessary action to implement the European Cloud Initiative is to
raise awareness and change incentive structures for academics,
industry and public services to share their data,
and improve data management training,
literacy and data stewardship skills (p.6). More recently the High Level Expert Group on European Science Cloud was created, and in the first report produced by this group produced the recommendation of training is made repeatedly requested as part of a strategy to promote more researchers’ engagement and awareness on Open Science (Ayris et al.,
2016). Moreover, in March 2016 at the Futurium space of the DG Connect for public consultation and debate, a working document on Open Scholarship for the adoption on eInfrastructures introduced a synthesis on the European Commission’s endeavour on the matter, claiming for actions to
cooperate with the New Skills and Professions group to design an action plan for training a new generation of scholars and shaping model policies for career development in Open Scholarship (Matt,
2016).
Finally, in October 2015 the Horizon 2020 workprogramme on Science with and for Society launched a call to fund projects aiming at training scholars for Open Science (European Commission Decision,
2016), closed by October 2016. A new generation of training activities will be promoted through this call, and a framework of reference will probably developed.
However, the models adopted have their focus on promoting specific competences rather than an overarching discussion of what it takes to be a digital scholar. In fact, a framework of competences would be based on the cycle of information science and the competent adoption open science instruments (open access, open data, open innovation). With regard to the institutional strategies and policies, in this first scenario the strategies are to be focused on the promotion of Open Access and Open Science as new frontiers of scientific communication, hence adopting policies to give value to open science. The environments, resources and activities required to this endeavour would be (as it is already) a mix of blended strategies promoted by university libraries and associations promoting open science; the initiatives would probably emphasize content (e.g. regulations for Open Access and Open Sciences, differences between institutional repositories and academic social networks, bibliometrics and altmetrics for the evaluation of research quality). Finally, for the showcase areas we would expect to see the products of practices relating open access scientific communication, public and participatory science, open peer evaluation, etc.
As for the second scenario, based on the perspective of Digital Humanities, the same evolution of the disciplinary debate on what being a humanist in the digital age means, has led to the creation of research centres for Digital Humanities (Romero-Frías & Del-Barrio-García,
2014). The framework of competences and scenarios of professional expertise are focused on activities of exploring the specific methods of digital humanities and the methodological debate (particularly ontological) on the nature of digitalized cultural heritage (Unsworth,
2013). The institutional policies are aimed at opening areas or centres to promote the development of digital humanities both from the technical (software, tools, labs), but also to cultivate the critical perspective on the methodological evolution of humanities at the cross-over with new computational methods (Klein,
2015). Therefore, the training activities would (and actually do) emphasize the adoption of instruments for digitalize or to manipulate digitalized cultural heritage. More recently, there is also an effort to build international communities sharing digital objects and discussing the methodological perspectives to their creation and analysis (Borgman,
2015).
The third scenario is based on the advances of research in the field of educational technologies and professional learning in digital and networked spaces. It mainly refers to the revisited theoretical DIAT model of Boyer under the light of digital contexts and instruments; in this model, scholarship is divided into four dimensions of activity. In spite of this reference, very few frameworks of competence to become and to be an expert digital scholar have been elaborated. Some of them could be too specifically related to a tool (i.e. academic blogging, by Heap & Minocha,
2012) or to a dimension of scholarship (i.e., discovery in the earlier stages of researchers’ professional development, by Ranieri,
2014). For this perspective, in fact, the training focus could be scholars’ professional learning and identity change while dealing with digital, networked and open contexts of academic practice (Goodfellow,
2014; Pearce et al.,
2010). Institutional strategies in this perspective should enable researchers to adopt informal, networked communication of an intertwined perspective of research and teaching in the making. Moreover, open online teaching and digital contents for learning should be considered in the evaluation of activities for career advancement. A debate on this topic has been clearly headed by the case of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) (Daniel, Cano, & Gisbert,
2015). As for the environments, resources and training activities, these would take the form of professional communities to reflect on the new practices and identity of the digital scholar. In line with this hypothesis, a recent open course “The Digital Scholar”
1 offered by the Open University of the UK over the basis of Weller’s work discussed the new frontiers of practice for digital scholarship taking into consideration teaching and learning as part of digital, open and networked professional practices; in this course an internal simulation of professional networks through the “OpenStudio” tool showed participants how they were engaged and which were their contributions semantically organized. In fact, the showcase areas would probably aim at showing networks of digital scholarship, sharing stories on new practices, as narratives of what it takes to be a digital scholar is.
The Table
1 synthesize the above hypothesized scenarios of faculty development for digital scholarship taking into consideration the three perspectives that contribute to the development of the topic.
Table 1
Scenarios of faculty development for digital scholarship
Framework of competences and scenarios of expertise focused on… | … The cycle of scientific communication, encompassing open research practices, participatory science and new modes of disseminating the scientific work. | … Specific methods of digital humanities and the methodological debate (particularly ontological) on the nature of digitalized cultural heritage | … Building a professional identity as digital scholars while dealing with digital, networked and open contexts of academic practice (including research and teaching). |
Institutional strategies and policies for… | … Promoting Open Access and Open Science as new frontiers of scientific communication. | … Opening areas or centres to promote the development of digital humanities both from the technical (software, tools, labs) and the methodological point of view. | … Enabling researchers to adopt informal, networked communication of an intertwined perspective of research and teaching. |
Environments, resources and activities as… | … A mix of blended (online and face-to-face), active and flexible approaches with emphasis on content like: Regulations for Open Access and Open Sciences, differences between institutional repositories and academic social networks, bibliometrics and altmetrics for the evaluation of research quality), etc. | … A mix of blended active and flexible approaches with emphasis on the adoption of instruments for digitalize or to manipulate digitalized cultural heritage, as well as communities for the methodological debate. | … A mix of blended and flexible approaches with emphasis on building professional communities to reflect on the new practices and identity of the digital scholar. |
Showcase areas for… | … Showing the products of practices (open access scientific communication). | … Showing the products of practices (digitalized cultural heritage). | … Sharing stories on new practices, as narratives of what it takes to be a digital scholar. |