Introduction

§ 1 The so-called Web 2.0 technologies bring with them new opportunities and new challenges in the field of scholarship.^[1] With social software we have a new set of tools with innovative possibilities and it is up to the community of practitioners in the area of the intersection between scholarship and technology to make effective use of them.^[2] This paper is part of the author's continuing research into the use of social software (blogs and wikis amongst others) as tools for education (meaning teaching and learning) and research. The primary interest is in how these new tools might facilitate cooperative learning and cooperative research, and help to build communities both of learning and of practice. Put simply, how can they be used to encourage and facilitate people working together, to be a medium for open collaboration; why is this necessary; and what perceived problems need to be addressed to make this happen?

§ 2 This paper was originally written for an earlier publication of the Digital Medievalist, Issue 4 (2008), Though much is taken, much abides: Recovering antiquity through innovative digital methodologies, a special issue in collaboration with the Digital Classicist presented in honour of Ross Scaife. It was put to one side due to other commitments and is offered now. Both classicists and medievalists share many methodological and material interests and both groups are at the forefront of innovative academic research practice. Indeed many scholars are members of both communities and there is much overlap as is demonstrated by this journal and Issue 4 in particular.

§ 3 The focus here is on the Digital Classicist wiki (http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/) as an example of openness and how this approach can be used to enhance the research process. This paper will discuss the research and pedagogic value of the project, and situate the wiki within the sphere of the advances in the scholarly application of digital tools for the humanities. It will consider discovery and collaboration in the research process and say something about openness before lastly commenting on the need for such projects.

§ 4 By way of introduction: the Digital Classicist (DC) is hosted at the Centre for Computing in Humanities (CCH) at King’s College London and has been set up by and for practitioners interested in the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient world (http://www.digitalclassicist.org/). It provides a web-based focus for research interest in this rich, diverse and multi-national field of scholarship. One of the stated aims of this project is to bring scholars together and to address head-on the issues of collaborative working; hence the use of a wiki (for more on the Digital Classicist see Bodard and Mahony 2008). Cooperation and collaboration are central to the DC's philosophy so rather than setting up in competition with other projects, partnerships were established with other institutions such as the Digital Medievalist, the Stoa Consortium, the Centre for Hellenic Studies, and the Perseus Project. This has helped to construct a central hub linking these together and giving focus to scholarship in this diverse area.^[3] Classicists are continually advancing the boundaries of scholarship and future links will be sought with the forthcoming Scaife Digital Library (SDL) and the expected Digital Portal of the American Association (APA).^[4]

§ 5 More on the DC wiki:

… as well as sharing information about themselves and their own work, members collaboratively compile, review and comment upon articles on digital projects, tools and research questions of particular relevance to the ancient world. They also list guides to practice, introduce the discussion forum and, most importantly, list events. It is these events that more than anything else define the Digital Classicist community by providing a showcase for our members' research and a venue for discussion, introductions, and inspiration for new collaborative relationships and projects (Mahony and Bodard 2010, 2).

Wikis

§ 6 Although wiki technology has been around since the mid 1990's, it is now becoming more widespread, with the most well known public example probably being Wikipedia.^[5] In a wiki any member with the necessary permissions is able to add, delete, or modify any of the content as well as set up new pages (or discussions if that were the format). This is an inherently democratic process according to Ward Cunningham, who is credited with the development of the first wiki software (Leuf and Cunningham 2001). Not only does this facilitate the creation of collaborative works but it also tends to level out the playing field with all contributors being able to have their say. This is one of the great strengths of the wiki but also one of the greatest obstacles to its scholarly use.

§ 7 This ability to add content rather than just view pages on the web is also more in-tune with Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of the World Wide Web, where [t]he idea was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out (Berners-Lee 1999). Berners-Lee has reinforced this point more recently: the web was driven initially by the group work need, … [although] the most rapid wealth growth has been outside of the work environment, in public information and he continues the web use is returning … to the original goal of facilitating workplace collaboration (Berners-Lee 2003, xiv). From this original vision, for many the Web has become an online marketplace and entertainment centre but it is being reclaimed here for scholarly use. These tools enable and indeed encourage collaborative working with the possibilities for openness and transparency, which were Tim Berners-Lee's original claimed intention.

§ 8 A wiki has no preset design structure and so tends to grow organically in response to the user group. It accelerates knowledge creation and dissemination (as we will see) but at the same time raises concerns among some scholars about attribution and how they might personally benefit from the work they contribute.^[6] For a wiki to work the wiki way its philosophy must fit with the culture of the user community (Leuf and Cunningham 2001).

Digital Classicist wiki

§ 9 The Digital Classicist was always conceived of as a community, a network of users (Mahony and Bodard 2010), and this is demonstrated by the DC wiki's opening page, illustrated in fig. 1, where the access statistics and Creative Commons icon are clearly displayed in the footer. The interactive tools chosen to facilitate this were the weblog and the wiki. After an initial phase the DC blog was joined with the Stoa Consortium with an RSS feed supplying links to the latest postings on the homepage of the DC website. The DC wiki is set up as a collaborative tool and although freely viewable has a defined list of members and editorial team. This means that anyone can look through and download any material they wish^[7] but only those with the necessary permissions are able to upload material, edit or otherwise make changes to material once uploaded. Only the administration team are able to add new members and make changes to the permissions.^[8] The DC wiki has a full list of Administrators, Partner Institutions and Members (shown in fig. 2) which means that there is a centrally defined user community, although our activities reach more widely by way of our discussion list and other online activities such as Twitter (#digiclass) and RSS feeds of the podcasts of seminar presentations and other related recordings (http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html).^[9]

Figure 1: DC wiki home page http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Main_Page

Figure 2: DC Members page http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Members

§ 10 As with all wikis, this one is fully searchable with an index which lists such things as Projects, Tools, Resources, Members and Events. Central to this wiki is the FAQ list which provides the means for collaborative authoring of full-blown guides to practice (see fig. 3). These guides to practice derive from the research experience of the practitioners involved and so should be considered research outputs in themselves.^[10] The page also has links to external guides to Good Practice such as those by The Stoa Consortium and Digital Medievalist, and 45 articles ranging from Advanced imaging techniques to XML for mark-up of text projects for the web. Users are invited to add questions directly to the wiki as well as circulating them to members via the discussion lists. The editors also add new categories (such as Agent-based modelling which is empty at the time of writing) and encourage practitioners in those areas to add content.

§ 11 As a community driven enterprise all approved members may add and edit material on the wiki pages. Again, as with other wikis, alerts may be set up to notify an author if any change is made to their material.

Figure 3: DC wiki FAQs http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Category:FAQ

The DC wiki as a research tool

§ 12 The argument that follows is supported by the published findings of the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities. This Summit was convened in 2005 at the University of Charlottesville Virginia. Participants identified areas where innovative change was taking place enabled by information technology that could possibly lead to what they referred to as a new stage in humanistic scholarship (Summit 2005, 5). The style of collaboration enabled by digital tools was identified as one such area. This has been further reinforced at the 2007 National Endowment of the Humanities Summit Meeting of Centers and Funders at Maryland. On the summit wiki among the areas of research priorities and funder priorities John Unsworth lists collaborative work.^[11] Further pages consider the benefits of collaboration, and others list problems associated with collaboration^[12]; one of the problems that John Unsworth notes is that [i]t is hard to learn how to collaborate (Summit 2007, Problems with collaboration). These processes of collaboration are facilitated by the DC wiki, as is the sharing of material and new knowledge thus generated. As we have seen above, this technology is not new but the ways it is now being applied is certainly innovative. Examples of this can be seen elsewhere in the Digital Classicist community such as at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) in Oxford where a Virtual Research Environment has been developed to allow real-time collaborative interpretation of documents by scholars in different geographical locations (Bowman et al 2010).

§ 13 Collaboration with joint works, publications, and analyses has long been with us but online interactive tools such as the wiki enable a new kind of collaboration. The material held in an online environment can be searched, analysed and edited all in a very short time by a number of editors regardless of their physical location. This in turn opens up the prospect of dramatic increases in productivity. Authoring material, annotation of that material, changes, corrections, and amendments are greatly accelerated, and knowledge creation is therefore greatly accelerated as a result.

§ 14 This process represents in effect a shift in academic culture away from the paradigm of the isolated scholar towards one where no single person has control or ownership. I have argued elsewhere that this perhaps needs humanities research practice to shift closer towards models in operation in the sciences and that we may need to develop protocols that borrow some aspects of science research practice where many areas consist of teamwork, where no single person has complete control or ownership, and where publications have multiple authors (Mahony 2007). This is also far more common in the Social Sciences and Library Studies where publications also have multiple authors and is becoming more usual amongst digital humanists.

§ 15 Classicists have always been at the forefront of innovation and collaborative thinking brought about by working with a disparate range of materials.^[13] This paper does not argue for the extinction of the lone scholar, but instead for a scholarly environment where both scenarios are recognised and valued. This is now starting to occur.

§ 16 An example of a recent collaborative initiative on the DC wiki is a collection of articles started up by Sebastian Heath and Matteo Romanello on Citation in digital scholarship. This has been added to and developed by other members of the DC community, all bringing their expertise to this important and often problematic area of digital scholarship (see fig. 4).

Figure 4: Category: Citation in digital scholarship http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Category:Citation_in_digital_scholarship

Pedagogy

§ 17 As well as the research issues there are also the pedagogical implications of this wiki. There are links to other sites useful in the study of the ancient world; lists of projects and tools including learning tools; and help with issues needed to guide students through the learning process. One example of this is the Philoponia project, the result of a research group at Cambridge which has created electronic tools to assist Latin language teachers integrate unseen translation exercises into their classes (http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Philoponia; http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Category:Projects).

§ 18 The DC wiki has always been useful as a case study for teaching when illustrating collaborative working, community projects, or Web 2.0 initiatives. This author currently uses the DC wiki as a specific example in an Electronic Publishing module and is aware of a colleague (Gabriel Bodard) who has similarly used the wiki to set up a discussion about Web 2.0 followed by an online one posted to the Stoa blog; the former is on an institutional intranet but the latter is publicly available and illustrated in fig. 5.

Figure 5: A discussion on the Stoa after using the DC wiki as a case study http://www.stoa.org/archives/1269.

§ 19 It is always difficult to quantify usage and measure effectiveness of any of these resources. We can track material, edits and comments that are uploaded to the wiki, but tools are not available in a standard wiki setup to monitor what is being read. This is in contrast with a Virtual Learning Environment such as Blackboard which can record the number and length of visits and the material accessed. However, even these statistics would not tell us if the material that was accessed had actually been read. The DC wiki has built-in statistics to display on the footer of each page the number of times that page has been accessed, but, again, that does not tell us if that page has been read. The same holds for the discussion mailing lists: some people actively contribute and generate further discussion and exploration, and others only read these discussions. Nevertheless people in both categories are equally part of the community; reading the discussion lists keeps members up to date with the current thinking and scholarship on key issues whether they contribute to that discussion or not.

Openness and transparency

§ 20 One more important aspect of the wiki is its openness, including allowing users to view the editorial history of the site. As discussed above, all changes on the wiki are tracked and made available to the user, as is authorship of pages and changes. If you know where to look, it is clear who has authored or amended a specific piece of information and the names often link back to a brief self-authored profile of the contributor. For example, looking at the Events page and clicking on the History tag will show who made the last change; it is possible to see what that change was and to roll back to the earlier version. This is illustrated in fig. 6, where the history at 30/10/10 shows the last edit to be 14:50, 30 October 2010 SimonMahony. This tells us that the last change was made by Simon Mahony (DC editor) and gives the time and date when the change was made (it is a requirement that all users register with their correct name rather than a tag). Clicking on SimonMahony takes you directly to his profile on the DC wiki, where you can see where his authority comes from and contact him if there is the need (see fig. 7). In other words, it is possible to see who authored the change and when any changes were made. The effect is ongoing peer review – if you don’t agree with an entry you are able to change it. For each page there is also the possibility to set up a discussion (a Talk page) to allow exchanges over any contentious issues (see fig. 8). The DC has a discussion list so this facility has never been implemented but I add the Talk: Digital Classicist discussion page from Wikipedia for purposes of illustration as fig. 9.

Figure 6: History page for Events showing date and author of all edits

Figure 7: User page for SimonMahony http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/User:SimonMahony

Figure 8: Discussion page (empty) Talk:Current Events page on the DC wiki http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/index.php?title=Talk:Current_events&action=edit

Figure 9: Discussion page Talk:Digital Classicist on Wikipedia (shown for illustration) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Digital_Classicist

Research and pedagogy linked

§ 21 What we have here with the DC wiki is a medium for cooperative research and cooperative learning. The Guides to practice and FAQs represent research output as well as being pedagogic tools. The wiki displays openness and transparency to encourage cooperation. The material is all freely available under the Creative Commons license for use and – more importantly – reuse.

§ 22 The skills required to make the most effective use of these modern tools must be taught alongside traditional writing and communication skills. Students should be actively encouraged to engage with each other both inside and outside of the classroom. With social software, students are already building networked communities and with the application of the blog and the wiki we now have the tools to build communities of learning and scholarship. ^[14]

§ 23 It is not advocated here that these social networks be used for the purpose of teaching and learning. Many Facebook users will be aware that some institutions do set up such groups, but the problem with doing this is one of separating the personal from the academic sphere. The report recently published by JISC (2009) highlights the problems associated with using social networks for learning. Their findings show that for young people Facebook and MySpace are avenues to get away from learning not to help learning (p. 22). The so-called Web 2.0 social networks develop a sense of community spirit, but that in turn leads to the formation of a clear sense of boundaries in web space between the private and personal space as opposed to the public and published one (JISC 2009, 24). It seems that students are defensive about the former and are uncomfortable with staff-initiated discussion groups in social networking space [such as Facebook and Bebo] when they are at ease with those they set up themselves for study-related purposes (JISC 2009, 24). It is perceived as an invasion of what is regarded as a personal invitation-only sphere.

§ 24 In contrast, wikis can be deployed as experiential and formative learning environments outside of the lecture hall or IT lab where students can create their own content, comment on each others', and share resources. It can be a group space on the web located somewhere between the study and the social domains to support teaching and learning (JISC 2009, 24). A good example of the way in which the wiki has been deployed as a pedagogical tool can been seen at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a course taught by Alan Liu in the English department called Creativity & collaboration: a project on new modes of authorship (http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/wiki1/index.php/Main_Page). Here the blog supports the formal educational space, and the wiki provides a less formal reflective space which belongs to the students rather than the academic course. For many years this author also incorporated a class blog (a simple Google Blogger account) in the arsenal of tools for modules that use seminar teaching. This is a way of encouraging the students to participate by first introducing themselves to the rest of the group and then by commenting on issues raised by their tutor or peers.

§ 25 Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us also have possibilities for creating collections of shared resources.^[15] This author frequently employs del.icio.us to create shared and student generated lists of online resources relevant to a particular module by using the course code for that module as a tag (keyword) to identify relevant material.

§ 26 Building communities of learning has been the subject of much study by those in the distance learning community^[16] but here it is argued that this needs also to be a consideration for all undergraduate programmes, and especially those in non-campus universities. With the move from set courses and the introduction of the modular and credit course system, students no longer follow a single programme of study but fragment to their chosen optional modules, often only coming together for so-called core courses. Study is in danger of becoming individual-based rather than community-based, with students being trained as solitary learners losing the collaborative skills they may already have. Putting this in the wider context, it is by building a community of learners among students (both undergraduate and postgraduate) that we will instil the cooperative and collaborative skills needed for a community of scholars (for which see further Mahony 2007).

§ 27 Teaching programmes should incorporate critical awareness of the possibilities of new innovations to develop skills to enable upcoming scholars to adapt to new technological advances as they happen. The most important of these are thinking skills, whether they be critical, lateral, or creative, for each is equally necessary. Students and scholars must be trained to work with the changes that have occurred in their subject disciplines and must be given the knowledge and expertise to cope with future changes. They must be trained to adapt and evolve, and this is why thinking skills are the most important. The ability to think gives the student power: the power to change and adapt to new technological environments, to be open to new ways of doing things, to be flexible, to be creative, and to manage the future changes that will inevitably occur.

§ 28 Another important issue that the DC wiki addresses is the needs of a variety of user groups. These range from the specialist, who requires full details, to the beginner who simply needs the basic information to get started and does not want to be swamped with too much information, especially of a technical nature. If you look through the wiki you will find that this material is often research output which is made available to be picked up and re-used by other practitioners.

§ 29 This environment encourages ideas and information about the creation and use of digital resources to be shared and discussed between experts in their respective fields; again making the results available to expert and non-expert alike. Much discussion is facilitated through email lists to which users can subscribe. Ongoing examples currently range from electronic critical editions of text, through copyright issues, open standards, and obtaining digital images of manuscripts.

Scholarship

§ 30 Here it is necessary to consider what it is that we are implicitly doing when conducting such an activity. We are engaging, contributing to and developing what might be considered the basic building blocks of scholarship or the fundamental operations that are performed during the research process. John Unsworth has written much about this process and uses the term scholarly primitives to describe these fundamental operations (2000). These primitives are relatively low level methods that combine and interact to form the basis for higher-level scholarly activity throughout the humanities—or to use his words, they are the irreducible currency of scholarship and basic to scholarship across eras and across media. Unsworth defines them as discovering, annotation, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating and representing, although he does not claim that his list is exhaustive. These primitives are explored more fully elsewhere (Unsworth 2000) but two of them will be considered here in the context of the DC wiki: discovery and annotation.

§ 31 Discovery is at the heart of all educational and research practice. Discovering implies finding something that you did not already know, and there have been consequences here with the advent of digital scholarship. In what ways are discovery facilitated and achieved? In general terms we learn from each other by discussion, argument and persuasion. This can be in the form of conversation, the printed word and now the electronic word. Traditionally a library or catalogue search for something we knew existed was always supplemented by expanding the search to those works adjacent on the stack shelf in the hope of finding something unexpected but relevant to our study; indeed this has been a spin-off benefit of the Dewey decimal classification system. The search in question was normally initially prompted by a course bibliography, bibliographic searches and suggestions from colleagues. Serendipity now becomes a useful tool such that something we find by accident will hopefully assist us in our search for knowledge. We have Google and Google Scholar to find things for us—often things that we had no prior knowledge of and so could not have looked for. We must all have learned from experience (as Unsworth notes) to value the serendipity of the unlooked-for search result (Unsworth 2000) just as now we must strive to record all that we find as again through experience, by the nature of the web, (just like the misplaced library book) it may not be there next time we look.

§ 32 Libraries and archives have always been sites of discovery for scholars. Digital scholars also discover through the internet, university network, CDs and DVDs, and the rapidly expanding range of digital resources. Much is also discovered, as previously, through conversation and dialogue with others but now the medium for this form of communication is frequently the Internet. Humanities scholars have used online discussion groups heavily for many years, such as Humanist, an international online seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities which started in 1987 and predates the Web (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/). Communities of scholars who correspond and work together using a mixture of electronic and conventional means have also emerged: the DC mailing list, the Digital Medievalist and the Stoa Consortium to name a few. The majority of projects involving digital scholarship are highly collaborative, and collaborative websites, wikis, and blogs mark the next phase of the development of discovery through communication with others.

§ 33 Let us also consider annotation. Marginalia dating back many hundreds of years is evidence that annotation has always been an important research technique and a legitimate area of scholarship in its own right along with mise en page and codicology. The ability to add the personal thoughts of a scholar to electronic texts or any other digital medium poses many challenges. Tools to facilitate annotation of the many forms of electronic information used in the humanities are under development at King’s College London as well as elsewhere. One notable example is Pliny (Bradley 2006), a prototype of an annotation tool which develops ideas discussed by John Bradley (Bradley 2003; Bradley and Vetch 2005; Bradley 2009).

§ 34 One key issue here is often not how to facilitate annotation but rather how to share these annotations between scholars in a way that is open but also secure from abuse or accidental damage. This is a great advantage of the wiki where the process of authorship can be tracked and preserved, although this is also true with many social network applications such as blogs, and indeed The Library of Congress are endeavouring to archive all public postings on Twitter since March 2006 (http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-081.html).

Conclusion

§ 35 Academic disciplines have historically grown up in separate boxes and it is our academic culture that distinguishes so greatly between the arts and humanities on the one hand, and the sciences on the other. The Presocratic thinkers would not have recognised this distinction, and natural science (as we call it today) would have been indistinguishable to them from philosophy. The etymology of science as knowledge is very different to our modern understanding of the term. This is very much a Nineteenth-Century construct, and the Oxford English Dictionary (online) records the earliest such usage at 1867.^[17]

§ 36 The emergence of digital scholarship in the humanities has had considerable impact on disciplines such as Classics and the study of the ancient world. The example of the DC wiki is used here to demonstrate the possibilities for collaborative authorship, the creation of reusable research output, the opportunities to add thoughts and comments in the form of annotation, and to facilitate the exchange of ideas. These are all central to building communities of learning and scholarship, but the most important is the exchange of ideas. It is in this way that knowledge grows and we are able to push the boundaries of scholarship.

§ 37 The standard way of accessing web resources is via the web browser which allows only limited interaction with what are effectively static webpages. The user can follow a list of links, view the content and (if his browser allows) print these off for future reference. Wikis and blogs allow interaction in a way that the traditional browser and webpage does not. These pages are dynamic and mutable as they can be edited by the user through their web browser. This gives users the ability to enrich the material and make them available for others, unlike a print publication where the reader may add notes in the margin but only for personal use. The model that develops here is one where the user moves from being a passive reader of other people's material to one that actively engages with that material, moving from reader to interpreter and contributor.

§ 38 Putting all this in the wider context, as argued above, it is by building a community of learners that we will instil the cooperative, collaborative, and reflective skills needed for a community of humanities scholars—skills that are equally in demand outside of the academy. In addition the DC wiki fills an important gap in the existing scholarly documentation by creating concise, reliable and critical guidance on crucial technical issues. The DC wiki also facilitates both community building and collaborative working, and this is the most striking and successful aspect of Digital Classics. Digital Classicists do not work in isolation; they develop projects in tandem with colleagues …; they collect data, conduct research, develop tools and resources, and importantly make them available electronically, often under free and open licenses such as Creative Commons, for reference and for re-use by scholars, students and non-specialists alike (Mahony and Bodard 2010, 2).

§ 39 Collaboration and interdisciplinarity have always been at the heart of Classical Studies. This is nothing new, but we must always look to the future and push the boundaries of scholarship forward. We must be reactive to new technologies and proactive in our approach to their use.

Coda

§ 40 The complexities of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and issues surrounding the sharing of thoughts, ideas and scholarship are not a new phenomenon. The following quote is taken from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1813 on the subject of ideas and copyright. It fits the purpose here.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it (Jefferson 1813).^[18]

§ 41 The important piece for this discussion is the final sentence: No one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. An idea is not diminished when it is shared.