Corina MacDonald on Datafication in Scholarly Communication

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/440912326539588/

In a ‘publish or perish’ culture, scholarly communication is inextricable from the mechanisms of prestige and precarity that define and shape academic labour. Today, the labour of scholars is made valuable in new ways as informal practices of sharing research are made profitable and measurable as data. This presentation focuses on the business models of platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate to explore these processes of datafication and their impact on methods and metrics of scholarly communication. The success of these platforms reminds us that scholars are not exempt from the pressures of platformed sociality and the new forms of visibility it produces.

Corina MacDonald is a SSHRC-funded PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on self-archiving infrastructures and platforms as a site of inquiry for understanding the impact of datafication on humanities scholarly communication. She is a founding member of the archive+design collective MAT3RIAL (mat3rial.com), which works with cultural organizations, researchers and artists to develop web-based tools and publications.

This event is part of the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series (https://www.feministandaccessiblepublishingandtechnology.com). This series was made possible thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill, MILA, the Dean of Arts Development Fund of McGill, Media @McGill, McGill's Department of History and Classical Studies, the William Dawson Fund, RéQEF, the Moving Image Research Laboratory, Element AI, and L'Euguélionne: Montreal's Feminist Bookstore.

There is no fee required to attend this event. Notes on accessibility will be announced closer to the event.