I am beginning an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Victoria in September 2016, somewhere between the fields of digital humanities, publishing, and library and information science, with a focus on open social scholarship. Within this context, I’ll be studying the interrelated areas of open access, education policy, digital publishing, social knowledge creation, and scholarly communication. So what are these Little Reviews, hmm? Basically, I’m going to use this space to air my thoughts on the relevant material I come across in my studies. A hybrid annotated bibliography / blog, Little Reviews will be the vessel that carries my casual, off the cuff remarks on my colleagues’ output. Far from a formal publication, and not even reaching an informal publication, I simply want to make transparent my encounters with the literature, as they happen.

In pursuing the guiding ideas of my PhD work, I’ve been reflecting on how one does open social scholarship. I’ve been inspired by a lot of different work on the subject, but I especially like to take up Dr. George Veletsianos’s recommendations, who, with Royce Kimmons, defines open scholarship as “a collection of emergent scholarly practices that espouse openness and sharing” in this 2012 blogpost. At the risk of going transparent in the Dave Eggers sense of the term, I’d like to aspire to being an open scholar. No, Dear Reader, you will not be bombarded with live stream footage of my every action and conversation, as the characters in The Circle are damned with. Rather, I hope to do a little bit of pre-publication experimentation, but without a specific form, format, or venue in mind. Far from Art for Art’s sake, I offer you this messy, in-process, and unquestionably modest gift of thought and reflection. I hope that some may be willing to offer back their own responses and considerations as well, and I’m going to play with what the best system for this kind of communication might be. Thank you for your attention!

Respectfully yours,
Alyssa