Dear all,
I share you concern. In the book
http://net-lang.net/, we can see that in 2010 the web was in English for only 27% of its pages. That means that English language is now a minority in the web. And this is a continuing movement (the proportion of English contents in the whole web is still going down). If English is a common and very useful language for both of us, it is a specific language, that we use only for a small part of our works. I am in favour of proposing a special category for English contents, not a special category for non-English contents (which may be considered as a ghetto).
I was also surprised to discover that
Hypotheses 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 :
Hypotheses is a publication platform for academic blogs. It enables researchers to provide real-time updates of developpements in their own research. Academic blogs can take numerous forms: accounts of archaeological excavations, current collective research or fieldwork; thematic research; books or periodicals reviews; newsletter etc. Hypotheses offers academic blogs the enhanced visibility of its humanities and social sciences platform. The Hypotheses team provides support and assistance to researchers for the technical and the editorial aspects of their project. - See more at: http://hypotheses.org/about/hypotheses-org-en#sthash.LWOdGoUI.dpuf
As a multilingual ressource, including spanish, english, german, french and some other languages, Hypotheses is an important resource for the native development of multilingual DH. We have yet a spanish steering committee, which is selecting the blogs and contents here :
http://es.hypotheses.org/ We have also a german speaking one, which is today the most active community after the French one :
http://de.hypotheses.org/ The French one is the oldest (this is explaining why they are so many french blogs in Hypotheses) :
http://fr.hypotheses.org/ We are on the process of creating an Italian and an English speaking steering committee.
Today, here is the list of the languages used in Hypotheses :
- Français (647)
- English (96)
- Deutsch (85)
- Español (23)
- Português (6)
- Italiano (6)
- العربية (1)
- Türkçe (2)
- 中文 (1)
- Nederlands (1)
Our project is to be widely open to language diversity and to reflect the diversity of our community. Our official goal is to host 1500 blogs by 2019 but if our growth continues with the same trends, then we believe that the platform will host 1200 blogs in 2014, and 1500 in 2015! The platform is, today, ranked second for the usage in the OpenEdition ecosystem. OpenEdition received 3 800 000 visits (2 000 000 unique visitors) in january 2014, including 1 145 000 visits coming from Hypotheses.
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?).
About this question :
* My recent chapter (2013) : Cyberclio. Vers une Cyberinfrastructure au coeur de la discipline historique
I do not know if the "religion of novelty" is typically anglo-american (even if I tend to personnaly believe this), but I think that we should think and discuss about it. If we create awards that focus only on immediacy, I fear that people who criticize DHers as fashion victims, and think they are gadget-oriented, may have some stronger arguments to stay out the movement.
Best regards,
Marin