Digital+Scholarship

Storify:

June 30, 2012: Edited nealstimler channel Storify is here (includes links to Tweet archives and visualizations): []

June 28, 2012: The un-edited mw12social channel Storify is here: []

TOPIC: Social Media: The Nexus of Digital Scholarship in the 21st century. DATE: June 28, 2012 TIME: 2-4 p.m. EST (see times in your time zone here)

Facilitator: @erinblasco Twitter: [|http://twitter.com/#!/erinblasco]

Discussant: @nealstimler Twitter:[|http://twitter.com/#!/nealstimler/]

MAIN TAGS: #musesocial; #musesocialns ALTERNATE TAGS: #musetech; #digitalhumanities; #digitalscholar; #digitalscholarship; #digitaltrans

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are the personal views of Neal Stimler and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian Institution.


 * Questions for Consideration**:

1. How do people in your institution use social media as tool to contribute to the scholarly mission? 2. Who are considered content producers in your institution? 3. Do these content producers reinforce traditional hierarchies or break boundaries? 4. Do people use an institutional account or personal account to dialogue about research? 5. Do people openly share research in progress or only promote finished projects? 6. Do content experts blog about their research process? 7. What types of information do scholars share through social media? 8. How does the process of scholarly debate through social media enhance humanistic knowledge creation? 9. Are outside researchers welcomed into dialogue with institutions about their scholarly work through social media? 10. How will museums serve their mission in the future if they do not preserve and enrich digital scholarship? 11. Why is social media useful for learning and increasing scholarly knowledge and understanding? 12. What opportunities do we have now with social media that we did not quite have before? How can we best take advantage of them? 13. How do we know if people are learning through social media? How can we sustain learning using social media? 14. Why does scholarship utilizing social media matter?

__Please consult the text below as primer for the the discussion__.

By Neal Stimler June 27, 2012
 * Digital Scholarship in Museums: A Manifesto in Beta**

A. Scholarship is:

1. Scholarship is a committed practice to lifelong erudition. 2. A scholar pursues the bounty of knowledge so that it can be shared and used by anyone to discover new understandings of the human experience. 3. Scholarship is democratic. Any person can be a scholar regardless of degree or pedigree. 4. Scholars demonstrate that humanity is an interdependent network of individual lives forged into a global community. 5. Scholars of consequence bolster dignity, inspire an expressive life and create knowledge that has utility for altruistic purposes. 6. To be resonant in the digital age, scholarship must be a collaborative, communal and a consciousness raising act. 7. If scholarship is not engaging and accessible it is not scholarship.

B. Museums and Scholarship:

1. Museums, through their scholarship, offer endless opportunities for people to bear witness to possibility for humankind to improve itself despite its past mistakes. 2. Museums show us that a better future is possible, one that is compassionate and committed to serving others. 3. Tools for a paradigm change for human identity are to be found in the dialogue between museum constituents as they critically engage each other in response to the catalysts of consciousness and memory - museum content. 4. Scholarly work in museums is a vocation that demands courage, patience and a never ending supply of passion to pursue each day. 5. Museums need to reinvent scholarly practice in response to digital culture and social media.

C. Scholarly Practice Through Social Media:

1. Social media is a scholarly tool because of the amount of information created or aggregated within these resources. 2. The social web is now the heart of lively and critical scholarly communication. 3. Museums need to preserve content and interactions shared through social media channels. 4. Scholarly exchanges happening in social media spaces document critical dialogue with institutions that formerly took place through analog formats that were not linked or shareable. 5. Museums build sustained relationships with constituents by making their scholarly content available with open access and without fee. 6. The locus of digital scholarship in a museum should be a digital humanities center. 7. Museums must integrate the use of social technology into daily work practices, so the process of our labor is open and transparent.

D. Why Does This Matter?

1. Museums cannot allow fear of community engagement in social media platforms to hinder constituents earnest and thoughtful connections to scholarship. 2. Relationship building through social media requires risk, but now is the time for museums to push boundaries that define who we are and what we do as cultural service institutions. 3. If museums are to thrive in social media culture, they must build resources that can be shared in common with all people. 4. Therefore a commons of resources should be created collectively, where collaborators and stakeholders share responsibility for the promulgation of human culture.