| Home | About | Subscribe | Search | Member Area |
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 733.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
Hosted by King's Digital Lab
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Jim Rovira
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons (22)
[2] From: Henry Schaffer
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons (63)
[3] From: Oyvind Eide
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons (77)
[4] From: Gabriel Egan
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons (15)
[5] From: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons (38)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2020-04-05 18:11:33+00:00
From: Jim Rovira
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons
Tim -
The Academia website allows you to see who your readers are, but I don't
quite understand your line of reasoning, especially when you think not
knowing who your readers are somehow drains the process of its "humanness."
The fact is no author has ever known who their readers were at any time in
history unless the reader happened to write to or about the author.
Academia actually shows you who your readers how and how much of your work
their read by page count, or if they downloaded your paper. That's
remarkable.
Your question about knowing who your readers are seems more important to
activities like tenure review, where you want to be able to show that your
readers are people in your field. Again, the Academia website allows you to
collect far more data than any other method. Otherwise, you're just relying
on numbers of citations, not numbers of readers.
It's a good site that provides a valuable service. I'm not saying it's
without flaws, but it has far more benefits.
Jim R
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2020-04-05 15:34:39+00:00
From: Henry Schaffer
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons
Kathleen,
Thanks for describing this site. I've added it to my Open Source
Resources page at https://projects.ncsu.edu/it/open_source/ It's at the
bottom of the Content/Educational and Other Content section.
--henry
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 3:59 AM Humanist wrote:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 730.
> Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
> Hosted by King's Digital Lab
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
> ...
>
> --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2020-04-04 12:22:00+00:00
> From: Kathleen Fitzpatrick
> Subject: An alternative to academia.edu
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> First, let me thank John Levin for pointing to Humanities Commons (
> hcommons.org)
> as a scholar-led, non-profit alternative to academia.edu. I'm mostly
> posting to
> repeat that information because John's post was included at the bottom of
> a long
> cluster of posts, and I don't want it to be missed.
>
> Humanities Commons currently serves more than 20,000 scholars and
> practitioners
> across the humanities and around the world. The platform is built on
> open-source
> software (and is an active contributor to the open-source community), and
> it
> brings together a Commons In A Box (CBOX) based social network and
> publishing
> platform with a Fedora/SOLR based repository. Deposits receive DOIs and
> can be
> actively shared with groups within the network; as a result, the 10,000
> objects
> in the repository have collectively received more than a million downloads.
>
> Accounts are free, and will remain free, to anyone regardless of position,
> institutional affiliation, or organizational membership. The repository
> contains
> deposits in more than 25 languages, and our traffic comes from more than
> 150
> countries.
>
> Come join us, if you haven't yet, and feel free to contact me if you have
> questions.
>
> All best,
> Kathleen
>
> Kathleen Fitzpatrick // Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of
> English
> Michigan State University // kfitz47@gmail.com // @kfitz
>
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2020-04-05 14:57:14+00:00
From: Oyvind Eide
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons
Dear all,
to pick up on one specific point from a much wider discussion:
> Am 05.04.2020 um 09:59 schrieb Humanist :
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 730.
> Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
> Hosted by King's Digital Lab
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
> Date: 2020-04-05 07:53:30+00:00
> From: Tim Smithers
> Subject: academia.edu
>
> Dear John and Ken,
>
> John: you seem to suggest you need a Google or Facebook login
> to get into Academia. I don't think you do. I don't have
> either of these, but I do log into Academia. Perhaps I got
> the wrong impression here?
>
> Is it manipulative? Yes, but no more so than anything else
> that seeks to make money out of you, I would say. Like Ken, I
> (only) use Academia as a place to hang PDFs of things I've
> published and written so others can get them without paying,
> if they so wish. But, yes, to do this you need at least a
> free Academia login. So perhaps you wouldn't describe this as
> access without paying.
It is easy for me to say one should not need companies such as Academia.edu when
I have access to several webservers and repositories and (if I refresh some
skills a bit) could easily set up additional ones myself. Such services are not
even available to everybody with a permanent job at a university, not to speak
of researchers in other work/life situations. Even for functional email this is
often a problem — the percentages of colleagues using gmail or similar shows a
clear geographical pattern and I assume this is no coincidence.
If I had seen Academia.edu as they operate now 15-20 years ago I would have been
outraged. But today…
The domain thing is just a local USA thing anyway, most universities are
directly under their national top domains (even if a few countries use things
like ac.uk). And for collecting and using information… looking at how much
highly valuable data people give to Facebook and others anyway, well, in the
actually existing world this seems to be quite normal.
I had, however, one experience I would suggest anyone with knowledge and
interest could duplicate or confirm in other ways. I have an Academia.edu
account (directly, not via google or anything) which I use sometimes to download
articles. However, I have no automatic login; I usually access the page without
being logged in. I accept cookies (otherwise many things do not work at all) but
acceptance settings are set to accept cookies from the website being visited
only. So this is what happened:
1. I searched for and found a paper.
2. The link led me to Academia.edu. I did not log in, I just looked at the
reference (and could not download it, which I did not need anyway).
3. Within minutes I had an email from Academia.edu suggesting 10-15 other papers
on the same topic.
So it seems to me that they link cookie information to information about logged
in users also when the user is not logged in and then do their marketing based
on that.
Outrageous? Not sure. But I am really happy that alternatives such as Humanities
Commons do exist. Choice is important. And I hope they can operate also with
colleagues working in countries currently under boycott by the country in which
the servers are located (which in the case of Humanities Commons is USA, right)?
All the best,
Øyvind
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2020-04-05 10:36:33+00:00
From: Gabriel Egan
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons
Dear HUMANISTS
I was pleased to see Kathleen Fitzpatrick
contribute to this debate about Academia.edu.
Her blog posting "Academia, not Edu" -- findable
by web-searching for her name and that title --
is essential reading on this topic. I'd encourage
those who are sanguine about this corporation's
attempted privatization of a public good to see
if they can think of convincing responses to her
critique.
Regards
Gabriel Egan
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2020-04-05 08:58:40+00:00
From: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.730: on using academia.edu & Humanities Commons
Dear All,
Please let me share a short blog post of my colleague, Naomi Truan, that is
relevant to the discussion about Academia.edu.
https://icietla.hypotheses.org/114 In short, it gives you a concise
explanation of why neither Academia.edu nor ResearchGate can be considered
as innovative solutions of Open Access publishing.
In my view, the most attractive feature of these sharing platforms is their
community uptake, that is, the guaranteed presence of our target audience -
in other words, our own presence. Such collective decisions and community
practices evolve along very complex dynamics (Matthew-effect etc.). Still,
the possibility of moving our research to sustainable, publicly maintained
environments such as Humanities Commons is there for us to populate it
(individually and collectively) enabling us to move away from platforms
that do not do any good for fair sharing of our scholarship.
Best,
Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra
Dr. Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra
Open Science Officer
DARIAH Coordination Office Berlin,
Centre Marc Bloch e.V.,
Friedrichstraße 191,
10117 Berlin,
Germany
www.dariah.eu
(https://twitter.com/etothczifra) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5350-067X)
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/142235661@N08/albums)
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
Software designer: Malgosia Askanas (Mind-Crafts)
This site is maintained under a service level agreement by King's Digital Lab.