Open Access, or the availability of websites and to whom they are open.

This week had me contemplating the idea of open access and what it means to the digital humanities, in relation to both canonicity and digital projects. 

Matthew Wilkens had a clever project which had him approaching the humanities and literature from a qualitative as opposed to quantitative.  Wilkens collected data from the “corpus of thirty-seven American literary texts published in 1851” (Gold 252).  What he found was, despite the prominent popular discussions of the New England Romanticism, there are a slew of places mentioned from around the world but most prominently a cluster in the American South.  This data opposes the traditional American literary canon.  Thus, the canon has been opened for other literary texts to enter and provide a different outlook on the literature of the early 1850s.

The project opened up more than just the canon, however.  It also explored the importance of quantitative research in the field of Digital Humanities.  In class, AJ voiced his concern that this research does not help contribute an understanding to the literary work itself.  However, Steve explained that we are looking at this project through only one lens.  By examining the project as useful to the humanities and not just the field of English, the results found by Wilkens open up to a broader possibility of research options.  Perhaps this idea is not that new to the Digital Humanities, but as an outsider and beginner to the field this approach seems open and accessible in general to a wider audience within the discipline. 

The concept of open access in Digital Humanities is most often applied to websites and a matter that I realized was much more complicated than initially thought.  When Ali sent out discussion topics for this week, his first question had me rethinking my understanding of open access.  He asked us to explore restricted, limited, and unlimited access to website content and how we would define an open-access website.

Prior to class this week, my understanding of open access came from whether or not an individual could explore a website without having to log on or pay to have access to log on.  However, as Brandon and Julia explained in class, one of the websites examined for class was open access to everyone in the United Kingdom but the information was only available to those in the States who have the ability to access certain journals.  This limits the accessibility and the definition of open access.  The definition can also be explored in terms of how accessible a digital project is to various people.  For instance, The DickensJournals Online allows individuals and scholars to sign up for free – which opens access to anyone who stumbles across the site – but also provides tools and resources for those who are visually impaired.  They have a text-to-speech tool which opens access to a diverse public. 

This week’s readings really had me contemplating what open access means and how the grant proposal I write should really explore and define how open I wish my proposed digital project to be.  From what was revealed this week, I need to explore the accessibility of my project as more than just whether one can log on and have free reign; I must also ponder to whom the project will be open.