Building a Network of Open Correspondence Projects

A model for Open Science

Francesca Di DonatoSNS - ERC

francesca.didonato@sns.it

This presentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Open Platforms for Digital Humanities IITowards a Network of Open Correspondence Projects

Cortona, September 26-27 2013

A network of Correspondences:

Why?

There are many project on the Web

Letters create graphs between persons/places

The Web is a graph too

Topology of the NetworkThe existence of a path from a node to another one is a graph property - it doesn’t depend on our ability to find it (Euler, 1736)

Direct network

Small world network

Hubs and authorities

Pareto principle

Digital On-line Open Linked

Our primary sources (data) must be

Access to data (physical layer: libraries, archives)

Manuscripts (quality, reusability)Transcriptions (open formats - XML)MetadataCritical edition’s criteriaOther resultsDocumentation

What can I do with (legal layer)?

Manuscripts Transcriptions MetadataCritical edition’s criteriaOther resultsDocumentation

+

+

Use of open standards (technological layer)

Linked Data

Shared standards (XML-TEI )

Open source software

Why Open Science?

“planned serendipity”

Some examples1. Polymath Project (2009)A collaborative space for mathematical research

3. HapMap (2002) http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

The goal of the International HapMap Project is to develop a haplotype map of the human genome which will describe the common patterns of human DNA sequence variation

2. GenBank (1996)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/Genetic data are immediately shared online

4. Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

200.000 volounteers cooperate with a group of experts in classifying galaxies

5. Wikipedia (2000 - on)A collaborative Encyclopedia

6. MAPPA Project (2011-14)Study predictive computational tools applicable to the archaeological potential of an urban areaCreate the first italian open digital archaeological archive

7. Transcribe Bentham http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

A collaborative transcription project

A community of knowledge in a republic of letters

changethe "traffic direction"

of science

how groups can work together to manage

the commons (intangible goods)?

1. Demanding open science

Funding agencies policies (ERC, Horizon2020, National Science Foundation)

Results (OA mandatory)

Data (OA mandatory; fundings only for digitized documents)

2. Encourage open science

How adopting new ways of sharing can become an imperative for scientists as it is

today publishing an article?

Altmetricshttp://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

What about evaluation?

"My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany. In fact, I saw a single man printing in a single month as much as could be written by hand by several persons in a year. ... It was for this reason that I was led to hope that within a short time we would have such a large quantity of books that there wouldn't be a single work which could not be procured ... Yet — oh false and all too human thoughts — I see that things turned out quite differently [...] now that everyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still, be erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books [...]"

Niccolò Perotti, Cornucopiae, seu Latinae linguae commentarii, V.Curio, Basileae, 1526, col. 1033 cit. by Robert Darnton, The case for books. Past, present, future, PublicAffairs, 2010

Thank you

References

Images[slide 2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/234447967/[slide 6] http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimmanleyort/8575656830/sizes/o/in/photostream/[slide 20] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Ready_for_final_exam_at_Norwegian_University_of_Science_and_Technology.jpg[slide 21] http://thoughtleadershipleverage.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/serendipity-unexpected.jpg

A.L. Barabasi, Linked, http://barabasilab.com/LinkedBook/

R. Darnton, The case for books. Past, present, future, PublicAffairs, 2010

M. Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Princeton University Press, 2011.