Opening Invitations

How do we, as infrastructure builders for digital scholarship, engage with the political aspects of knowledge production that is grounded in critical reflective practice? 

Justice and advocacy-based work is emerging as a major component of digital scholarship – which voices are highlighted? By whom? How are questions of privacy and risks of surveillance balanced with sharing rich cultural records and histories? How do librarians and practitioners advocate for resources and support for supporting critical digital scholarship?

Driven by a desire to create space for community and space to think together balanced against not making Yet Another Entirely New Thing DiScontent is a gathering space for example policies, programs, modes of practice, case studies of success, as well as a space for conversation and support. Advocacy for librarians and researchers as collaborators/partners by taking common concerns are an explicit underlying assumption of DiScontent.

We chose Humanities Commons as a platform, in part, because it enabled us to efficiently point out to existing resources, cross-post blogs and resources, as well as facilitate discussion (at times anonymously). We hope the ability to contribute to discussions without pressure of identification can increase the diversity of voices contributing to shared discussions about what justice and advocacy-based work in digital scholarship looks like in practice.

Resources we anticipate growing include:

• policies, programs
  • boilerplate language repo
  • what choices were made and why, templates for documenting decisions
• support for individuals, collections
• modes of practice
• effort and time (invisible labor, we’re all busy)
• backchannel of despair
• miniature case studies of success
• sustainability
  • of persistent collective knowledge, in the face of a need for anonymity
  • of the work itself
  • of our individual involvements in it
• Privacy and space to talk anonymously about these issues
• Responsibilities in working with place-based, vulnerable collections

We invite anyone working in Digital Scholarship and/or justice and advocacy based work to contribute.