Dear everyone,
I am Marin Dacos, director of the Center for open electronic publishing. As Claire Clivaz, I am happy to see that people don't forget their discipline. In my case, I was an historian, but now I am fully a digital humanist, as my job is 100% to facilitate the open access publications in arts, humanities and social sciences. I am the founder of Revues.org, Calenda, Hypotheses and the soon to be released OpenEdition Books.
The OpenEdition team is located in Marseilles, but also in Paris and Lisbon, and we plan more partnerships in other countries and towns. OpenEdition aim is to improve visibility of humanities online, and to foster innovations in digital publishing. Our main project, in this concern, is Hypotheses, which is a multilingual platform for academic blogging. We already have a german version, thanks to a partnership with the Max Weber Fundation, and a spanish version, thanks to a partnership with Uned (Madrid). We have other partnerships in preparation.
OpenEdition is involved in promoting bibliodiversity and open access. The concept of bibliodiversity includes : - diversity of languages - diversity of publishing places - diversity of publishing players
We are convinced that globalization does not mean that we will have domination of only one culture, one player, one paradigm and one language. This would be a global failure and lead research and culture to a sad poverty. We think that globalization means mixing, hybridation and exchanges. And strong linguistic areas. As far as I know, the brilliant german philosophical tradition owes a lot to german language, and it is probably the case for a lot of paradigms and innovations.
Saying that, I don't think that we have to fight English a common language. But I would defend Globish as a common language, because there are few non English native speakers that are able to speak/write with a very elegant and subtlety language in English. For this reason, I would recommand to revamp the organization of our DH international events. They should be held in Globish, with a lot of respect for non-native speakers. Some propositions : - when an English native speaker is speaking, all non native would have a "green card" that they could rise at any time during the conference. This would be used to say "I don't understand, you speak to fast, or you are making references to cultural anglo-american knowledge" - international conferences should take care of the quality of the sound in the rooms used for conferences. For example, the quality of the sound during the introducing conference of Claudine Moulin in Hambourg was not good, and it was difficult to understand 100% of her talk, which was very interesting. - during the expertise process of DH conferences, we have to encourage non native speakers by any possible ways. The goal should be to reach parity. We should consider that perfection of the English language SHOULD NOT BE ANYMORE a criteria of selection. That will take time. We should consider that this change won't occur in less than 5 or 10 years. But we should involve in this process. Affirmative action could be one way. Other ways could be to put money in translation processes. We could also ask to English native speakers to submit their article in Spanish or in French... They would discover how difficult it is for us, and that they should become more indulgent in the selection process. Or both.
I am against the idea of making different language-based sessions in international DH events. We should use only English, in order to be sure to reach a full audience, and avoid language-based ghettos.
Last, but not least, I would be very happy if English native speakers could support non natives in enhancing their English. I would suggest that one US/UK searcher support one non US/UK searcher. Who want to support me in improving my written/oral English?
Best regards, Marin