Review a project

Often, it seems we consider thoughts, scholarship, ideas, as a form of intellectual property. We even use that word, “property,” which invokes claiming land, territory, areas. 

Individual ownership presents itself as important, as claiming ownership can lead to determining the value of the scholar. In such structures of ownership, those who have more power often get more chances to claim such “territory” as their own. They are able to build upon what is already there, or claim to have found something new and ignore what already was there. 

When we practice open cultivation, we are tending to the ideas, lands, territory that are presented. We come together as a community to understand what land is there, to grow and help those ideas. We do not see what is being presented primarily as property. 

This cultivation is, as the term implies, helpful, not harmful. It does not intend to destroy, flatten, or minimize. Cultivation is caring for, improving on, refining the presented scholarship. 

At Poly Publishing, we encourage assessment of a variety of forms. 

Open Review Discussion Sessions

Our review sessions of digital publications are modeled by the California State University LibGuides Open Review Discussion Sessions. The LibGuide Open Review Discussion Sessions provides a space across California State University Systems for library practitioners to come together to discuss reference, publishing, critical digital pedagogy, critical race theory, and our work in libraries, working towards holding criticality to fight against the farce of neutrality within knowledge organizations.

For more information, please explore the Open LibGuide Review LibGuide. Each LORDS session uses a rubric as a suggested framework for the discussion. For example, a local sample used rubric, the draft LibGuide, and the result after the session.  For more information about the California State Univeristy (CSU) wide efforts, visit the Confluence link (needs a CSU login). While the rubric is full of suggested ideas, the conversation itself is the most important. 

Visual Annotation Tool

Working with the Software Engineering Capstone course CSC 402 AY 2020-2021, Creative Works hopes to build and release a visual annotation tool. The tool will allow editing of ‘transparencies’ with a multitude of doodles, brush strokes, images, and other methods of annotating a visual experience on a screen.

CapstoneSquad: AJ Jiro, Jaipreet Hundal, Kaishu Miyao, and Miya Pollard

To add a doodle extension onto your Chrome browser, please download the code (the green button on the right hand side) from this Github, and then follow the instructions in this Gitbook.

 

creativeNTR: Garrett O’Keefe, Nathan Irwin, Sydney Jaques, Tanner McCormack, and Will Fuchs. 

To explore the DoodleTator (a fork from hypothes.is) from creativeNTR, please read through this Gitbook.  

Multimodal assessment

Most peer review is done in written forms, but multimodal review allows for assessment of various forms of scholarship, as well as allowing the assessment itself to be in various forms. 
Peer review is a system to evaluate scholarship and its credibility for publication: a group of peers (an undefined standard) review the quality and nature of the work by not just the thesis, but also the voice, tone, format, and citations. The idea behind peer review is to constructively criticize scholarship to help it become better.

This system for assessing and valuing scholarship has generally taken a race-neutral stance. However, this stance neglects a diversity of thought, format, innovation, and scholarly persons. The assumption of scholars holding the same objective stances when reviewing work is incorrect.

Here are a few examples of other formats of assessment:

  • Podcasts
    Dr. Cheryl Ball is an advocate proponent of multimodal scholarship, and she demonstrates this in a podcast peer review system here. 
    Read more about openness and professional advancement practices, authored by Dr. Ball, Kim Barrett, Peter Berkery, Jessica Clemons, Sheree Crosby, Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, and Stacy Konkiel here. 
  • Twitter 
    Brian Watson #tweetvaluation’s Dr. Hannah Turner’s “Cataloguing Culture Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation” here. 
  • Born Digital Formats  
    As more student work is becoming born digital, the standards across disciplines have turned towards not only looking at content to evaluate, but also the format: example guidelines. 
    Generally, the criteria calls for not assessing personal opinions on what the scholarship could be, but rather look at what it should do – access knowledge, showing significance, and justifying the form of the research. 
    This video describing digital dissertations also goes through various forms of evaluations. 
  • Other Models
    Historically, Western Europe has been the forefront of pushing for open, digital scholarship. For example, this book about digital dissertations goes through the legitimacy of a different mode – included performance based, electronic, and new digital tech.  

More ideas about peer review, politics of citation, and algorithmic bias in databases are published as a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo LibGuide.