Here are my notes from Richard Lucier’s (Scholarly Communication Institute) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

Scholarly Communications Institute (SCI) is a 6 year Project, funded by the Mellon Institute and “housed” at the University of Virginia. The Institute is involved with:

• Research and Discovery
• Analysis
• Presentation
• Presentation
• Dissemination
• Access and Use

SCI is involved mainly with Humanities scholars (interest of Mellon Foundation). SCI realizes that “digital scholarship is collaborative”. The overall goal of the institute is to create an opportunity for scholars to understand and embrace digital scholarship. SCI components involve summer meetings, communities of action, and real advances in digital scholarship. What they hope is to create are communities of action in a disciplinary way to create real advances in digital scholarship.

They also bring to the summer meeting 3 to 6 graduate students. They’ve found that the grad students have a significant impact on the senior scholars in terms of creating new ways for digital scholarship and analysis.

SCI is also concerned with issues of ethics across a number of different fields, including biomedical and journalistic ethics, etc.

The communities of action are created around publication and knowledge gathering. The real advances they have made include, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Online and Architecture Visual Resource Network. This is not just an online journal, but it is a journal that seeks submissions in a variety of different technological forms. It has become a very different resource for people to access and to publish in. The Architecture Visual Resource Network will be a resource that allows people to input resources and have a vetting process that allows them to move from a big pile of info to something embedded into a database sanctioned by the Society of Architectural Historians. They have also used Flickr in their work to evaluate tagging v. structured metadata (to be able to publish, etc.).

SCI is currently interested in visual media scholars: film, video, photography, 3-d simulations and new media art. They are bringing new media scholars together to better understand the critical aspects of digital media for their work in order to understand the architectures that need to be put in place. They are interested in bringing together both theorists and practitioners. What they hope to develop this summer is a visual media scholar community to explore a community of action moving forward (something that NEH, Mellon and other foundations are interested in supporting).

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