To inform our discussions at SCI, we ask all participants to answer the following questions. One or two paragraphs for each of the three topics should be sufficient. We formulate scholarly production, scholarly communication, and enabling resources, partnerships, and infrastructure in three discrete questions. You may find these distinctions imprecise, arbitrary, or unhelpful. We encourage you to answer these questions as you construe them.

We will provide a summary of participants’ answers to you before the meeting.

1. Scholarly production

Describe how the availability of new information technologies is changing the practices of scholarly research and authoring in the humanities fields you see through your own practices and those you observe among colleagues. Examples of change could include:

• the effects of new efficiencies (and inefficiencies)
• new areas of investigation
• new research questions
• new methodologies
• new collaborations
• changes in required tasks, skills, and resource budgeting
• changes in organizational structures, services, audiences

Of those you cite, which have the greatest long-term significance? Which ones merit our special attention in the upcoming SCI discussions?

2. Scholarly communication and dissemination

Describe the non-traditional or informal formats and venues for scholarly communication and publishing you routinely use (that is, not monographs and journal articles, but databases, visualizations, blogs/tweets, wikis, websites).

Describe the advantages /disadvantages of them with respect to issues like:

• Reaching audiences
• Gaining peer recognition
• Your sense of quality, reliability, and persistence of scholarship
• Perceptions by others of quality, reliability, and persistence of scholarship
• Ease of creation, use, maintenance

3. Enabling resources, partnerships, and infrastructure

Describe the kinds of resources that are most important to have access to for advancing humanities scholarship. In particular, describe any opportunities you see that you are not able to capitalize on now because of perceived constraints in existing infrastructure, practices, knowledge, and other resources. These might include:

• Personnel
• Technical infrastructure
• Institutional capacities
• Financial means
• Access to appropriate knowledge and expertise

Please also describe your and/or your organization’s core competencies and capacities, and the resources that you have to offer others in pursuing a common goal of advancing humanities scholarship.