Online Attention to Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster)

“Online Attention to Digital Humanities Publications” is the final title of the poster I created and worked on with Leo Havemann (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Javiera Atenas (University College London).

This poster is being presented in the Digital Humanities 2014 conference, Lausanne, Switzerland, July the 10th 2014, 2:00pm – 3:30pm. I am blogging this after having set it up on the exhibition board. Paper was heavy and it wouldn’t stay up!

As you can see the poster is already heavy with text (its real dimensions are A0 -118.89 x 84.11 cm-, so it is legible), but we were unable to include all the findings we obtained and had ambitiously promised in the abstract.  We chose to focus on mapping the principal authors of the outputs in the dataset and on looking at the role of open access, licensing, etc. We are working on a long paper where we visualise and discuss the international distribution of the Tweets mentioning the top articles in the dataset and engage with the relationships between online mentions, access type and citations.

The poster is available for download and citation as:

Priego, Ernesto; Havemann, Leo; Atenas, Javiera (2014): Online Attention to Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster). figshare.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1094345

We suggest altmetrics services like the Altmetric Explorer can be an efficient method to obtain bibliographic datasets and track scholarly outputs being mentioned online in the sources curated by these services.  Our dataset reflects that outputs with “digital humanities” in their metadata were not published in fully-fledged Open Access journals. The role of SSRN and arXiv as open repositories was found to be relatively significant, but the licensing of the outputs available through them was not always immediately clearly displayed.

Our working definition of “Open Access” requires outputs to be open for human and machine access through  CC-BY or at least CC-BY-SA. The absence of clear licensing information at output level is perceived to be problematic, as is the lack of any outputs clearly and visibly licensed with CC-BY.

The fact the 3 most-mentioned outputs in the dataset were available without a paywall might signal towards the potential of Open Access for greater public impact. ‘Free access’ outputs in paywalled journals did not reflect higher mentions nor citations than their paywalled or non-paywalled counterparts.

Though the dataset reflects a predictable dominance of authors based in the USA, the dataset points towards a growing presence of international digital humanities researchers.

Source data:

The information on the poster is derives from a dataset based on an original report obtained with the Altmetric Explorer on April 23 2014. More recent reports are likely to vary.

Priego, Ernesto; Havemann, Leo; Atenas, Javiera (2014): Source Dataset for Online Attention to Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster). figshare.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1094359

The original Altmetric Explorer data export was refined, modified and edited by Ernesto Priego, Leo Havemann and Javiera Atenas.

If you use, share or refer to this poster and data please use the citation information above.

This poster and its source data are shared under a CC-BY license.