An update on OpenEdition Lab’s activities

OpenEdition Lab published several papers recently and will be taking part in various events this autumn. The Lab is also taking a closer look at the discoverability of open access content from the humanities and social sciences (HSS) and how such data is appropriated.

Book review

Simon Dumas Primbault, CNRS junior professor of open science in HSS and manager of the Lab, has published a critical review of Samuel Goëta’s book, Les données de la démocratie. Open data, pouvoirs et contre-pouvoirs (Data within Democracy: Open Data, Power and Counter-Power) (C&F Éditions, Caen, 2024), in the OpenEdition Lab blog. The review was initially written for the Hypertextes seminar organized by the Centre for Internet and Society.

Read the blog post in French here: Pour un principe de diversité épistémique dans le processus d’élaboration des décisions publiques. (Making the Case for Epistemic Diversity in Public Decision-Making Processes)

A Usage Observatory to learn more about the practices of OpenEdition users

The Usage Observatory research project is part of the umbrella Equipex+ COMMONS project. Its goal is to gather and analyse data on how users navigate on OpenEdition’s platforms, to gain insight into usage and make resources more accessible to users.
In a blog post published on OpenEdition, Simon Dumas Primbault, CNRS junior professor of open science in HSS and manager of the Lab, Ioanna Faïta, a doctoral student in information and communication sciences, and Mohsine Aabid, a doctoral student in computer science, remind us of the specifics of the project and provide an overview of the first set of data collected.

Read the blog post here.

And to find out more, read these posts in French from the Lab’s blog:  

• Mohsine’s post: Voyages Virtuels : Première analyse computationnelle des habitudes de navigation sur OpenEdition (Virtual Journeys: Initial Computational Analysis of User Navigation Habits on OpenEdition)
• Ioanna’s post: Observatoire des usages COMMONS : La nécessité d’une première étude exploratoire (The COMMONS Usage Observatory: the Need for a Preliminary Exploratory Study)

Delving into the history of OpenEdition

OpenEdition Lab welcomed two interns, Juliette Maurin-Revest and Seyf-el Islam Nader, from May to July 2024. They produced a time line charting the history of OpenEdition, as well as a series of portraits based on interviews carried out with a variety of stakeholders that have helped make OpenEdition what it is today.

The discoverability of open access HSS content

Marcella Araujo Malheiros, a doctoral student in Information Science and Communication (ISC), joined OpenEdition Lab on 1 October. She is working with Lise Verlaet, a professor in ISC from the University of Montpellier 3, on the discoverability of open access HSS content.

Discoverability is defined by the French government’s open access platform data.gouv.fr as “how easily data is found when performing a search, and how easy it is for users to come across data they didn’t know existed.” Its success lies in data documentation, using tools to make searches more effective (citations, information architecture, platform interoperability) and content editorialization. However, it is often hindered by paywalls, inaccessible data, inefficient tools and incomplete metadata. In contrast to findability, which evokes a relatively closed and known documentary space with clear signposting, discoverability is at the interface between content characteristics and user practices – it embraces the fact that the documentary space is always open, ever-changing and partially, but not necessarily impartially, indexed. Marcella Malheiros is thus in the process of documenting the discoverability of open access content hosted on OpenEdition, and on COMMONS platforms more generally, as well as the ways in which this data is appropriated.

Upcoming events

• The Lab will be present at the 2024 Métasciences event organized in Lyon on 15 November
• The one-day Workshop on the Governance of Digital Knowledge Infrastructures begins at 9.00 am on Thursday 28 November, in room 3.06 of the Humathèque building on the Condorcet Campus at Aubervilliers, near Paris
• The next in a series of public roundtables organized by OpenEdition Lab on Rethinking Scientific Research in the 21st Century, and held in third places in Marseille, will be take place on 28 November. It will address the topic of the climate crisis
• The workshop on the remediation of heritage collections, organized in collaboration with the Mucem and the BnF, will be held from 9.00 am on Monday 16 December at the MucemLab (Mucem, Fort Saint Jean, Marseille) and from 9.00 am on Tuesday 17 December at the Conservation and Resource Centre (Mucem, Saint Charles, Marseille)

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