Academic Scholarship in the Digital Age

Abstract

Digital information and the increasing amount and availability of its basis, data, is changing scholarship to a more or less dramatic extent. New areas of research and knowledge have been created by the availability of machine-produced data, calculations, and simulations in various academic disciplines. In academic teaching, too, digitized sources and forms of learning are about to convert studying and lecturing to a considerable amount. However, no adequate infrastructure for digital information has emerged yet. Whereas in the field of scientific information providers (libraries, document centers, publishers etc.) new services, arrangements and business models are being experimented with, the scholarly disciplines are, by and large, lagging behind these developments, as are most scientific work practices and teaching in general. To sum up: An information infrastructure of scholarly information has been developed, but not one for scholarly information, yet. What this means, and some ideas of what could be done about it, shall be discussed in the talk.