Scholarship 2.0!

"What if you could combine Wikipedia?s collaborative productionstrategy with the peer-review standards of a respected academicjournal?"  This is the question that Professor Susan Brown, Professofof English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and at GuelphUniversity, asks in a new grant of over a million dollars funded by theCanada Foundation for Innovation's Leading Edge Fund.  The grantsupports the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, the logicalfollow-on to the groundbreaking Orlando Project.  Scholarship 2.0.   This is the next big idea and Professor Brown and herteam are the people most likely to make it happen.  Congratulations,Susan! Congratulations,Susan!

Million dollar grant for innovative online project

by Erin Prenoslo

Susan Brown

(Jul 3, 2009)

Asevery undergraduate learns early on, citing Wikipedia in an academicpaper won?t usually get you into your professor?s good books.

For Susan Brown, Professor of English & Film Studies at the U of Aand lead researcher on the new Canadian Writing Research Collaboratoryproject (CWRC), the idea was worth over a million dollars in fundingfrom the Canadian Foundation for Innovation?s Leading Edge Fund.

CWRC will encompass an integrated online database of primary texts byCanadian writers, scholarship by Canadian academics, and geographicaland historical information. A user-friendly search system will allowresearchers of all skill levels (from elementary students to universityprofessors) to access the information in the digital archives and tostudy relationships between the sources.

For example, a researcher could pull up a map of early Canadianbooksellers and compare it with a list of texts published in that areato investigate how publishing infrastructure affected writing. Or theycould locate their text on a timeline of events to see the effects ofthe introduction of the railway or a change in government policy.

Brown stresses that one of CWRC?s main innovations will be its emphasison producing information specifically for digital formats. ?A greatdeal of the scholarship that?s online now is kind of a mimicry of printforms,? she says. ?It doesn?t really leverage the power of computingexcept in some very basic ways - for instance, to deliver it topeople?s screens very quickly.? Brown?s team hopes to find morestrategic ways of using computers in humanities scholarship: as toolsfor finding new links and for presenting data in new ways, not just as?hyped-up card catalogues and typewriters.?

Brown?s ultimate goal for CWRC is to provide as much information aspossible by open access. ?What we want to do is create a resource withhigh community value and wide community buy-in, and we want it to bewidely available,? she says. ?We hope it will become the first stop foranyone wanting to research Canadian writing.?

The CWRC team hopes to reach beyond Canadian universities to raise theprofile of our literature internationally, to encourage the teachingand sales of Canadian material at home and abroad and to improve thedigital literacy of the next generation of Canadian leaders.

CWRC will build on the achievements of the Orlando Project, a databaseof women?s writing in the British Isles which was spearheaded by Brownand her colleagues Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy and Stan Ruecker.Other major CWRC contributors at the U of A include Marie Carrière(Director of the Canadian Literature Centre), Eleni Stroulia (ComputingScience), Arie Croitoru (Earth & Atmospheric Science), Ofer Arazy(Business) and Geoffrey Rockwell (Philosophy/Humanities Computing). TheCFI grant extends for four years, and Brown hopes the basic platformwill be in place within two years.

Related Links:

The Orlando Projecthttp://www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/Department of English & Film Studieswww.arts.ualberta.ca/efs/