Dear James,
Nice to hear you on this list and thank you for your precise answers. I guess that, if I had known the rule, I would have explained what was new in Hypotheses in 2013. The main novelty in Hypotheses since 2 years (that means before 2013) is that we have decided to be open to non french contents. To do so, we have created specific steering committees for each language. So far, we have opened committees for german and spanish. The spanish speaking community is slower to join us than the german community, mainly because did not spend enough time, energy and money to promote the platform in Spain and latin america until now. We have plans to do so with different partners. If spanish speaking people in the list want to join this project, I would be very happy to discuss with you.
My main concern related to the focus on novelty is that the opening of a new language will take more than one year to become a success. So, the question is : should we focus on the date of the start of the project, with a likely small success at the begining (so very little chances to win), or after some years of promotion and development (but then with no chance to win any award because it will be considered as an old initiative). When we started Hypotheses, in 2008, it was a very small project, with no chance at all to be awarded, and now it is a success, but still no chance to be awarded. I guess that the best way would be to wait for the next major upgrade of the platform. But it will be a bit tricky to know how big and disruptive should be this upgrade.
This is not a complaint. I just want to share with you my questions related to the best way to apply to DH Awards. Do you have any advices to provide?
Best regards, Marin
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 11:58 AM, James Cummings James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.ukwrote:
On 04/02/14 05:03, Marin Dacos wrote:
I was also surprised to discover that Hypotheses http://www.hypotheses.org was refused for inclusion in the nominee because it was not _created_ in 2013. For those who don't
know Hypotheses, here is a short presentation :
Hi Marin,
To give you the background on this, the committee all recognised Hypotheses.org as an extremely important and excellent publication platforms for academic blogs. But we took the decision before nominations that were announced that if we could not find any sign of extremely major updates, publication, or launch in 2013 that this would rule the nomination out for the awards for that year. We couldn't find any such indication for hypotheses.org itself and made the decision that just adding new blogs to the site didn't really count as a major infrastructural change. There was no malice intended in this decision, and the number of nominations falling at this hurdle was significant. (There were some resources which hadn't been touched since the late 1990s nominated!) Yes, this puts a focus of the awards on a year by year basis. This has downsides but also highlights that DH is a continually evolving and cutting edge field. That is part of the awareness we wish to highlight.
The rejection of Hypotheses as nominee for DH awards is not
related to our openness to language diversity, but to a strong focus on novelty in our field. That means that we do not focus on structure, nor in infrastructures. But DH should be the first community considering that cyberinfrastructures are very important for our future, our sustainability and our capacity of lasting (or capacity to stay?).
Exactly, the rejection of hypotheses.org was only to do with date, certainly not to do with any aspect of language diversity. (Indeed, as I said in my reply to Isabel we are actively trying to encourage that, in our poor stumbling ways.)
You are right that the DH Awards are focussed on novelty (though don't judge that particularly as a criteria -- a site can be nominated that uses quite old technology, if it was released in that year), and I see that this has both benefits and drawbacks. I don't see how we could have a set of annual awards which did not explicitly rely on the annual-ness of those awards though. The committee wants clear and easy-to-determine reasons for whittling down of the nominations provided since voters have a hard enough time looking at just a few resources per category. Other suggestions are appreciated.
Best wishes, James (founder of DH Awards)
-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford
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