Visualizing Scholarly Communication

Abstract

University libraries across the country are investing in Digital Humanities and digital scholarship initiatives, providing support for research and teaching using digital tools and methods. Because digital scholarship offers scholars new ways to visualize and analyze their research, which communicates such research in new ways, it has clear lines of connection with scholarly communications. Combining these two unique areas of library activity offers opportunities for new library research by leveraging methods from DH to tackle problems in scholarly communications. Researchers at Purdue are collaborating on just such a project by applying digital tools to the analysis of predatory publishing. In this presentation, we apply the digital tool VOS Viewer to visualize the map of citations and publications surrounding the scholarship on predatory publishing practices. Practicing what Digital Humanists call “distant reading,” or the macroanalysis of systems as a way to see bigger structures, we demonstrate the interconnection of central concepts. In our presentation we will showcase the tool for interested librarians and share our analysis of results, including linkages between “access” and “openness” with “predatory.” Visualizing the larger structure of predatory publishing will showcase the larger issues central to scholars.