Open Scholarship

Note: This is just the first part of a longer post that I may work into a short article.

The word “open” coats any noun that it modifies with a sheen of virtue. This is probably a good thing, most of the time, but all that conferred luster might have some bad consequences. Since “open” can be paired with almost anything, its many word-partners (society, science, scholarship, access, and on and on) coast off of some of “open”’s lent legitimacy. We might not linger on the nouns, in other words, since their essential goodness has already been established by “open.”

The open data movement—the push to share government, academic and commercial data with very few restrictions—has some of that borrowed sheen. The “data” half of the pair, in particular, doesn’t get much scrutiny. This comes across in Open Knowledge International’s various open data initiatives—its Open Data Handbook (2012, and since updated), DataHub repository, Data Portals directory, and School of Data education network. A UK-based, foundation-funded nonprofit, Open Knowledge (OKI) is the movement’s leading champion.

The group is plainly doing good, important work, in spreading the open-data gospel around the world. But OKI’s conflation of “data” with “knowledge”—the group’s core, mission-driven message—is narrow in troubling ways. According to its definition, open knowledge just is open data, collected and shared: “Open knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful, usable and used.” These data are the “building blocks” of open knowledge.

That’s an awfully improverished—or at least partial—definition of knowledge: that it’s just bits of data, aggregated and repurposed. The group’s official definition of “open” (“Open Definition 2.1”) takes the knowledge/data conflation a step further. The stress is on “interoperability” and “machine readability”:

The work must be provided in a form readily processable by a computer and where the individual elements of the work can be easily accessed and modified.

But surely knowledge, open or otherwise, is much broader than that: literature, documentary, narrative journalism, criticism, textual exegesis in all its forms—these count too. But not by the OKI definition: what would it mean for poetry and ethnography to be interopable or machine readable? The idea that animates the OKI, and the open-data movement by extension, is that knowledge is chunked and atomized, portable and fungible. It is a pointillist picture of knowledge that leaves out not just literature and journalism but half the academy (the humanities and the humanistic social sciences).