Open Agenda and Digital Humanities

Simon Mahony, Xingyi Chen, Puyu Wang

Abstract  Digital humanities, as an active promoting force of the Open Agenda, shares the same core values with Open Science: freedom, collaboration, inclusion, sharing, openness, and transparency. Digital technologies not only provide the technical foundation for realizing freedom, openness, and sharing, but they also transformed human thinking and the paradigms of scientific research. The widespread application of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, has exerted a significant impact on the disciplinary literacy, research paradigms, and trends of digital humanities.

Simon Mahony, Emeritus Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London (UCL), has been active in the field for over 20 years. As a contributor, researcher, and educator in digital humanities, he analyzes the development of this field from a comprehensive perspective. Through three in-depth interviews with Professor Mahony, this article discusses the spirit of openness in digital humanities, starting from the Open Agenda and Open Science, with a particular focus on the development and future of digital humanities in the era of artificial intelligence. By conducting a comparative analysis of domestic and international discussions surrounding the Open Agenda, this article aims to uncover the various focal points and its potential development in China, providing new perspectives for digital humanities’ spirit of openness and exploring its expansive prospects in the new era.

Keywords Digital humanities; Open Agenda; Open Science

Authors Simon Mahony, Emeritus Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London, Professor at the Center for Digital Publishing and Digital Humanities at Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai), and Visiting Professor at the Department of Information Management at Peking University; Chen Xingyi (corresponding author), graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and a student researcher at the Institute of Digital Humanities at Renmin University of China. Email: cxyamalia@gmail.com; Wang Puyu, PhD student at the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.

0 Introduction

On November 23, 2021, UNESCO released the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science[1], which defines open science as an integrated and inclusive framework combining movements and practices, aiming to achieve open access, use and reuse of scientific knowledge, promote scientific and social development by strengthening scientific cooperation and information sharing, and share the production, evaluation and dissemination of scientific knowledge with other groups in society that were not previously included in the scientific community. Since its inception, digital humanities has been a firm advocate of the spirit of openness. It shares the concepts of cooperation, inclusiveness, sharing, openness and transparency with open science. It is the most compatible field in humanities scholarship and is closely related to the birth of the concept of "Open Agenda". The concept of "Open Agenda" originated from the convergence of multiple movements that aim to democratize knowledge and make academic research more inclusive and transparent. These movements include open access[2], open science[1], participatory culture[3] and digital humanities[4], all of which advocate sharing of knowledge and public participation in the research process.

The open agenda covers the transformation of publishing models, the trend of promoting free and open release of research results, and the impact of these initiatives on the academic community. For the open agenda, foreign academic circles have formed a relatively systematic research framework and theoretical system [5,6,7,8,9,10], while domestic research on this topic is still in its early stages and there is a lack of relevant academic literature. In the field of digital humanities, Simon Mahony, Professor Emeritus of Digital Humanities at University College London (UCL), has extensive research experience in open publishing, open data and digital humanities. He delivered a keynote speech entitled "Open Agenda: Open Access Publishing" at the 2022 Beijing Forum, and delivered a keynote speech entitled "Open Agenda: Open Access, Open Publishing and Open Science" at seminars at Renmin University of China, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, and Zhejiang University. Professor Simon Mahoney is able to analyze the open agenda from multiple perspectives, including policy, technology, and academic culture, and provides a unique and comprehensive perspective on this topic, especially around the connection between open publishing and research methods, the challenges and opportunities of promoting open practices, and the practice of open agenda initiatives in Europe and the UK[2].

Professor Mahoney has not only played a key role in the construction and development of UCL Digital Humanities, but has also held important positions in many universities and research institutions such as Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai) and Peking University, accumulating rich experience in digital humanities research and education. As a member of the Digital Humanities Curriculum Design Committee of the iSchools Alliance and a member of many international academic institutions, Professor Mahoney has unique insights and rich practical experience in promoting openness and innovation in the field of digital humanities. Through an interview with Professor Mahoney, we hope to showcase the basic issues and development status of the open agenda in the field of digital humanities, so as to promote relevant discussions in China.

Simon Mahony, male, Professor Emeritus of Digital Humanities at University College London, Visiting Professor in the Department of Information Management Department at Peking University. His research focuses on digital humanities with specific interests in education, communication, information studies, digital storytelling, equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and the open agenda. His representative works include "The Open Agenda: Why Openness and Transparency Are Needed" (2022); "Towards Openness and Transparency to Better Facilitate Knowledge Creation" (2022); " Language and the Subjects of Study in the Digital Humanities" (2020); "Language and Cultural Hegemony in Digital Humanities" (2019), etc.

1 Open Agenda and Open Science

Q1: What is the definition and content of the “open agenda” and how does it relate to “open science”?

A: For me, the open agenda means that everything is open, as open as possible, but closed when necessary because some content may be sensitive or confidential and subject to data protection laws. The open agenda includes open education, open access, open data and open science, and perhaps open peer review and open source. These are all part of the same movement towards openness and transparency.

In my opinion, open science simply means open scholarship. I have a classical education background and my roots are in the humanities. The word “science” can be extracted from the Latin word “scientia”, which means knowledge, and thus is similar to the word “scholarship”, in the broadest sense, including all humanities, social sciences and other academic fields. An example is the European Open Science Cloud [11], which was established to store all European research data without any distinction.

I would avoid defining something and support inclusiveness rather than strict divisions into specific academic fields, which may lead to exclusion between disciplines. This inclusive approach can promote our collaborative work with multiple disciplines. In short, open science is part of the open agenda.

Q2: When did you start paying attention to the issue of the "open agenda"? Is it related to your digital humanities research?

A: Before working at UCL, I worked at the Humanities Computing Center (now the Digital Humanities Department) at King's College London (KCL). Before the widespread use of virtual learning environments (VLEs), the Humanities Computing Center had servers independent of KCL's institutional infrastructure for project hosting, and some of the server space was dedicated to storing teaching materials. I was teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the time, and all teaching materials were hosted there. These materials are also stored on the open network without logging in - anyone who knows the URL can access them, and these materials are available until the server is updated. Because it is my own intellectual achievement, any images used are also mine or in the public domain, so there are no copyright issues. At the same time, I was also responsible for the operation of an online master's program and was very familiar with copyright and intellectual property issues. This is how I learned to develop publicly hosted online teaching materials, which also involved intellectual property issues.

But when I moved to UCL, I found that this openness was not common, and students needed to log in through the institution to access my teaching materials. A few years later, UCL, King's College London and many other universities began to use Moodle (https://moodle.org/) as a course management tool and teaching material hosting platform. In 2011, a colleague introduced and recruited me to participate in the creation of open educational resources funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom. So I participated in the development of the "Open Educational Resources for Digital Humanities Project" project. This sparked my research interest in open education, and within a few years I held workshops and conference presentations with colleagues, which made me more aware of the open agenda.

For me, the open agenda starts with education, that is, making my teaching materials openly available to anyone who wants to access it. I will do my best to make all my intellectual achievements free under the Creative Commons Licence.

Q3: What attempts have you made to promote the open agenda in your teaching and research, such as your UCL, what is this process?

A: I promote the open agenda and emphasize its importance in my teaching, guest lectures, and keynote speeches. I have also published articles specifically on this topic [12,13] and have presented the principles of the open agenda in articles on other related topics. I am also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Open Humanities Data[3], which is fully open access, and a member of the advisory board of Panta Rei[4], the digital journal of historical sciences and teaching at the University of Murcia, which is also fully open access.

Going towards openness requires a cultural change within academic institutions, and I am glad that UCL is leading the way in this regard. For example, the first university press in the UK to go fully open access was UCL Press[5], and indeed the URL of the UCL Library[6]’s open access page includes the term “open science”.

2 Open Agenda and Digital Humanities

Q4: Is there a specific open agenda for digital humanities? Or is the “open agenda” universal and does not vary by research field? 

A: As mentioned above, it seems to me that digital humanities are advocates of the open agenda. In the UK, we support open access and open publishing, encourage all scholars to publish openly, and only articles published in open access form will be included in the Research Excellence Framework, a system used to assess the research quality of UK universities. The various aspects of the open agenda and how to participate in it may vary from research field to research field, but fundamentally it is about openness and transparency.

Q5: Is the open agenda particularly important for the digital humanities field? In turn, what can digital humanities do for open science?

A: In turn, it seems that - in the West, I cannot speak for other regions - digital humanities have become strong advocates of the open agenda. Most of us try to make everything open (such as a large number of open access digital humanities publications), but unfortunately, this is not always possible.

For example, open access publishing requires funds to pay for article processing charges (APCs). This is disadvantageous for junior scholars who do not have funding, and scholars from institutions with less funding. When I was working at Beijing Normal University, I used my research grant to pay for APCs, but I am currently affiliated with University College London as an emeritus professor (retired status), so I cannot get funding for this. So this also means that the remaining articles under review in my contract with Beijing Normal University will not be published publicly. Because my contract with Beijing Normal University stipulates that they must be published in SSCI/SCI/A&HCI journals, which all require APCs for public publication.

I hope that all future articles will be submitted to open access journals and journals without APCs, regardless of their status in the Clarivate Web of Science list. For me, open access publishing is more important than SSCI, etc. See also my articles "Towards openness and transparency to better promote knowledge creation" [12] "Open agenda: Why openness and transparency are needed" [13].

Q6: Can you introduce the development of the open agenda for digital humanities in different regions that you have observed, such as the characteristics and difficulties faced, and the reasons behind them?

A: Any new thing always brings problems and objections. For example, for open educational resources, our research shows that copyright is a major issue, as teachers often share materials without necessarily knowing where they came from. There are similar objections to open access publishing and open data - I mentioned this in my article, but both seem to have become standard practice in the West because people can see the benefits - more people read your publications, data can be reused. The Journal of Open Humanities Data is part of Ubiquity Press[7], where we publish research papers and short data papers to complement full papers and promote open datasets with the goal of making them available for reuse. UCL Press also makes all content available for free download as PDF.

UK universities require faculty to publish openly, and only open access papers are included in assessments and count towards staff promotions. Major funders such as UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Wellcome Trust[8] also require that research data from projects they fund be made public.

The situation in China is slightly different, but China has taken some steps to emphasize the importance of open access publishing and open data. UNESCO has a publication on open educational resources[9] in the People’s Republic of China and a global open access portal. The National Science Foundation of China has also issued a Policy Statement on the Implementation of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research Papers[10], which states that the results of publicly funded research belong to the whole society and should be freely available. Similarly, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a plan to achieve large-scale open access to journal articles. Several top Chinese universities, such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, are developing open data repositories. The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license is now available in both simplified and traditional Chinese to address differences with Western regions and cultures[14].

New initiatives are always bound to encounter opposition, but there is now a growing awareness of the value of open access publications and the data on which they are based.

Q7: Outside of academia, there are many commercial companies engaged in digital humanities-related work, and there are also many non-professional enthusiasts working on various digital humanities projects. How will they affect the open agenda? What role do they play in the field of digital humanities as a whole? 

A: Commercial companies play an important role in digital humanities research - we need collaboration, especially in areas such as imaging, immersive virtual reality, and the metaverse. These are areas where commercial development is not necessarily available to university staff. For example, the UCL Digital Humanities Imaging Lab has equipment provided by commercial companies for imaging manuscripts and precious documents, and these companies also provide training. I have also worked with the Digital Humanities group at the Shanghai Library, and they have also worked with many commercial companies, such as the equipment and systems in the new East Library of the Shanghai Library. Similarly, large infrastructure initiatives often rely on commercial platforms for development.

Non-professional enthusiasts, what we call “citizen science” or “citizen-science”, also make a huge contribution to research initiatives. Think of the many crowdsourcing projects that rely on volunteer work, such as the UCL Transcribe Bentham[11] project and Zooniverse. Much work in the cultural heritage field is also undertaken by actively engaged members of the public[12].

There are countless possibilities for both commercial applications and citizen science in the open agenda. Citizen science platforms are inherently open and can be accessed by anyone. Commercial products also allow for the public release of research materials, provided that the work is carried out by university or museum staff.

Q8: Now more and more humanities scholars are trying to use generative AI such as ChatGPT to assist in research, including basic work such as building databases, data annotation, and data analysis. Do you think it will replace the common tools currently used in the field of digital humanities? Will it become a development trend in digital humanities research in the future? Can it be considered a change that will occur within digital humanities? What impact will this have on the open agenda?

A: This is a difficult question to answer, and only time will tell us what impact it will have. I don't know if any scholars are using generative AI to do basic work such as databases, data annotation, and data analysis. Generative AI relies on the data it can access, which usually comes from the Internet or training data sets. I have used ChatGPT, but the output answers are more general and lack a certain depth, so I haven't used it for other more in-depth research.

In my opinion, artificial intelligence should be part of information literacy teaching. Rather than showing what it can do, it is more important to focus on what it can't do. It can be part of the educator's toolkit, not part of the researcher's toolkit. Because an important issue for all generative AI and AI more generally is trust (or lack of trust). This is clearly stated in the European Commission’s White Paper (2020): On Artificial Intelligence – A European Approach to Excellence and Trust[13]. The European Parliament’s Artificial Intelligence Act (2024)[14] , and the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Regulation: A Pro-Innovation Approach[15]. In China, the Interim Measures for the Administration of Generative AI Services, which came into effect in August 2023, focus almost entirely on generative AI[16].

Q9: You have talked about the open agenda on many occasions, so are you optimistic or pessimistic about the development of the open agenda in digital humanities? What are the current and future factors that affect this process?

A: As mentioned above, we now see and understand the benefits of the open agenda. Overall, I am optimistic, but the concept needs to be accepted and supported by the academic community and publishers. The previous model was that scholars needed to pay for publishing, and then university libraries had to pay subscription fees to access these publications, but this model is gradually becoming ineffective. At the same time, we need to be clear that those of us who are in universities or associated with academic institutions are in a privileged position. Open access and open data are different from universal access. There is still a digital divide between the rich and the poor in terms of access, such as the lack of or high cost of internet access in many areas. There are many other issues that hinder universal access, such as language issues, accessibility to publish papers or data online, connectivity - not everywhere has the same connectivity as we do, and content filtering and blocking.

In addition, we live in an era where the Internet needs to be protected from corporate interests. Those who seek to divide us rather than unite us for their own personal ends; those whose aim is to manipulate public opinion and make us doubt our knowledge and understanding of a situation, thereby causing confusion. These are the dangers we face in an Internet society. Openness and transparency in education are key. When we write articles or produce data, we must be clear about the sources of evidence we use to support any point of view. Therefore, we need complete and transparent documentation so that we can be confident in the information and data. We must also be prepared to question the authenticity and reliability of the information we provide, looking for evidence of potential bias, conflicts of interest, and balanced views.

Digital humanities provide us with key tools to do this, and digital tools and digital literacy should be a core part of every academic course.

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[1] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science/european-open-science-cloud-eosc_en

[2] https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/asi.24652

[3] https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/

[4] https://www.um.es/cepoat/pantarei/

[5] https://www.uclpress.co.uk/

[6] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access

[7] https://ubiquitypress.com

[8] The Wellcome Trust is one of the largest charitable foundations in the UK.

[9] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000215547

[10] https://www.eifl.net/sites/default/files/resources/201409/140515-nsfc_oa_policy_english.pdf

[11] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/transcribe-bentham

[12] https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/27/hobbyist-archaeologists-identify-thousands-of-ancient-sites-in-england-deep-time-digventures-national-trust

[13] https://commission.europa.eu/publications/white-paper-artificial-intelligence-european-approach-excellence-and-trust_en

[14]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/seance_pleniere/textes_adoptes/definitif/2024/03-13/0138/P9_TA(2024)0138_EN.pdf

[15]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1176103/a-pro-innovation-approach-to-ai-regulation-amended-web-ready.pdf

[16] https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/202307/content_6891752.htm