Newfield, T.P., Duggan, A.T., Poinar, H. (2022). Smallpox's Antiquity in Doubt. Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759422000290

Abstract

"Smallpox, caused by the variola virus (VARV), is prominent in modern histories of the ancient Mediterranean world. The disease, or the diagnosis of it, has shaped estimations of the scale and significance of epidemics and pandemics, notably the 2nd-c. Antonine plague, and the burden of disease in large cities and regions densely populated in antiquity. Here we synthesize recent paleogenetic and evolutionary biological literature that casts significant doubt on the existence of a VARV that caused a disease we would recognize – clinically, ecologically, or epidemiologically – as smallpox in antiquity. On the basis of current data, it is time archaeologists and historians began to eradicate smallpox from their histories of the ancient world."

Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A., Kocher, A., Borbone, P., Khartanovich, V.I., Buzhilova, A., Djansugurova, L., Bos, K.I,. Kühnert, D., Haak, W., Slavin, P. & Krause, J. (2022). The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia. Nature, 606, 718-724. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3

Abstract

"The origin of the medieval Black Death pandemic (AD 1346–1353) has been a topic of continuous investigation because of the pandemic’s extensive demographic impact and long-lasting consequences. Until now, the most debated archaeological evidence potentially associated with the pandemic’s initiation derives from cemeteries located near Lake Issyk-Kul of modern-day Kyrgyzstan. These sites are thought to have housed victims of a fourteenth-century epidemic as tombstone inscriptions directly dated to 1338–1339 state ‘pestilence’ as the cause of death for the buried individuals. Here we report ancient DNA data from seven individuals exhumed from two of these cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana. Our synthesis of archaeological, historical and ancient genomic data shows a clear involvement of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in this epidemic event. Two reconstructed ancient Y. pestis genomes represent a single strain and are identified as the most recent common ancestor of a major diversification commonly associated with the pandemic’s emergence, here dated to the first half of the fourteenth century. Comparisons with present-day diversity from Y. pestis reservoirs in the extended Tian Shan region support a local emergence of the recovered ancient strain. Through multiple lines of evidence, our data support an early fourteenth-century source of the second plague pandemic in central Eurasia."

Slavin, P. & Sebbane, F. (2022) Emergence and spread of ancestral Yersinia pestis in Late-Neolithic and Bronze-Age Eurasia, ca. 5,000 to 2,500 y B.P. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119 (21), Art. No.: e2204044119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2204044119

Slavin, P. (2019). Land Produce [in Europe between 1000 and 1350]. In T.P. Newfield & P. Slavin. (Eds.), New Environmental History of Pre-Industrial Europe Vol. 2 (1000-1350). Brill Academic Publishers.

Slavin, P. (2019). Mammals [in Europe between 1000 and 1350]. In T.P. Newfield & P. Slavin. (Eds.), New Environmental History of Pre-Industrial Europe Vol. 2 (1000-1350). Brill Academic Publishers.

Oram, R., Slavin, P., & Newfield. T. (Eds.) (2019). A Handbook of Medieval European Environmental History, vol 2 (1000-1350). Leiden: Brill.

Slavin, P. (2019). Death by the Lake: Mortality Crisis in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 50(1), 59-90. https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01376

Abstract

"Our information about the fourteenth-century plague in Central Asia, or indeed anywhere east of the Crimea/Caspian, derives from a close analysis of the epigraphical evidence from three East Syriac (Nestorian) cemeteries not far from Issyk-Kul’ lake in northern Kyrgyzstan. The absence of palaeogenetic data to confirm it could be partially rectified by both textual and palaeoclimatological data. The ratio of mortality rates between “normal” and plague years in the Issyk-Kul’ communities is not unlike that in Europe during the plague years 1348 to 1350. A proper appreciation of the pandemic outbreak requires setting its timing in a climatic context. After two pluvial episodes in the 1310s and 1320s, precipitation levels in Issyk-Kul’ during the 1330s underwent a sharp decline, thereby depriving sylvatic rodents of sufficient grass to sustain their high population density. Hence, the plague pathogen and its vectors needed an alternative host to maintain their activity. Anthropogenic factors, including international trade and military campaigns along Central Asian trade routes, may also have contributed to the outbreak and spread of the plague. The Issyk-Kul’ mortality crisis ties into wider questions about the origins and initial spread of plague after the 'big bang' of the thirteenth century, whereby four new plague branches emerged (possibly in Central Asia)."

Slavin, P. (2019). Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain. Environmental Histories of the North Atlantic World, 4. London: Brepols Publishers. http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503547800-1

Summary

"The agrarian crisis of 1315–17, known to history as the Great Famine, was one of the most devastating environmental crises to hit Europe within the last two millennia. The almost biblical flooding of 1314–16 brought about a series of crop failures, triggering a widespread agricultural crisis that unfolded into a catastrophic famine, which hit both human and animal populations with unprecedented force. The impact of this crisis, and the major long-term environmental consequences that followed, thus mark a truly watershed moment in European history.

This volume provides an in-depth study of the Great Famine as it affected the British Isles, but through this focused approach, it also offers new insights into the late-medieval North European economy and society at a time of political, socio-economic, and biological shocks and crises. Close analysis of contemporary archival sources reveals that the Great Famine was a highly complex phenomenon made by both Nature and man; and this is reflected in a highly interdisciplinary approach that studies climate, economy, demography, and health, as well as the way in which human behaviour further exacerbated the impact of famine."

Slavin, P. (2020). Mites and merchants: the crisis of English wool and textile trade revisited, c. 1275-1330. Economic History Review, 73 (4), pp. 885-913. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12969

Abstract

"On the basis of 7,871 manorial accounts from 601 sheep-rearing demesnes and 187 tithe receipts from 15 parishes, this article addresses the origins, scale, and impact of the wool and textile production crisis in England, c.1275–1350. The article argues that recurrent outbreaks of scab disease depressed sheep population and wool production levels until the early 1330s. The disease, coupled with warfare and taxation, also had a decisive role in depressing the volumes of wool exports. Despite this fact, wool merchants were still conducting business with major wool producers, who desperately needed access to the capital to replenish their flocks."

Slavin, P. (2021). Out of the West: Formation of a Permanent Plague Reservoir in South-Central Germany (1349-1356) and its Implications. Past and Present, 252 (1), pp. 3-51. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa028

Slavin, P. (2021). Climate, Pathogens and Mammals: England in the Age of Emerging Diseases, c.1279-1362. In M. Muller (Ed.) Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life. Routledge History Handbooks. Abingdon: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Medieval-Rural-Life/Muller/p/book/9781138849228

Abstract

"To appreciate complex interaction between climate, environment and pathogens, it is necessary to establish a wider climatic context of late-medieval England and elsewhere in the North Atlantic region. Piecemeal weakening of the NAO on the one hand and reduced levels of sunshine on the other meant gradual cooling. Indeed, Greenland witnessed a period of severe cold spells, peaking in 1303, 1320 and 1353, while Iceland saw sea-ice formation along its northern coast in the 1310s and 1330s. These climatic changes had some far-reaching implications on the bioecological environment and consequently, the health of its inhabitants. While natural forces may have played a detrimental role in initiating the scab outbreak, they seem to have had only a limited impact on its spread across the British Isles. It is equally important to appreciate the impact of climate on the availability of fodder resources and, consequently, the health of bovids."

Dumas, Geneviève. "Environnement, climat et espace à Montpellier et dans son arrière-pays lagunaire (XIIIe-XVIe siècles)" (syllabus, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, PQ, 2021).

Video essay — 2022

This video provides an overview of the history of digital knowledge commons, as well as some of the challenges facing today's digital knowledge commons and academic social networking sites. These challenges include the enclosure or commercialization of commons; the exploitation of researchers and research data; and the exclusion of certain people from digital spaces. It concludes with a brief discussion of how not-for-profit digital knowledge commons such as the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons are working to address these challenges.

Author: Graham Jensen

Presentation — 2022

So much of the contemporary discourse around open scholarly infrastructures still seems dependent on an ethic of "if you build it they will come," even though we know from the history of print cultures that authority, trust, and value are hard-won qualities that are underpinned by dynamic political, social, cultural, and economic work. This contribution examines the ways we think about scale, scarcity, and prestige in both online and print contexts. In the last decade, Scholarly Commons have emerged as a particular intervention in the struggle for and against platform dominance in contemporary scholarly communications. To what extent do these interventions work counter to print-capitalist models, and how can then effectively facilitate open social scholarship?

Authors: John Maxwell and Beatrice Glickman

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: DHSI

Presentation — 2022

The library, the archive, social media, and the city are all spaces in which people experience serendipity: the incidental discovery of valuable information. Humanities and social science scholars reap the benefits of these ‘a-ha’ moments during their daily working lives, from the computer screen to the hallways at conferences, and often put these discoveries down to chance. However, the connection made during the experience of serendipity is up to the individual scholar to realize, making these occurrences less ones of chance, and more so the result of years of knowledge accumulation and recognition of connections to one’s own work.  The HSS Commons is a meeting space where these scholars can connect and share their knowledge widely, with and beyond their own academic communities, and as a result, is an online environment rife with possibilities for serendipity. This talk will focus on a few affordances which members might wish to cultivate for themselves as the commons blossoms into a space for sharing, community, and cross-fertilization.

Author: Kim Martin

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: DHSI

Presentation — 2022

The journey of our relationship with the Digital Commons has fundamentally changed and continues to shape the way we consider support and partnership for national cloud-based research projects in the Compute Canada Federation. Whether they be in or outside Humanities and Social Sciences. We will share these changes and the way that we are committing to support the Digital Commons and its launch. We will also discuss the context of a substantial transition period and time of change at the Compute Canada Federation, and how through that, we intend to support the Digital Commons and other projects like it in the future.

Authors: John Simpson and Lydia Vermeyden

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: INKE Partnership Meeting

Presentation — 2022

As we work to transform higher education, making our institutions more inclusive, more just, and more generous in their relationships with constituencies both on- and off-campus, we must also consider the roles that our ways of working with our communities of practice play in such transformation. This talk will explore the need for a scholarly communications infrastructure that is open-source, open-access, not-for-profit, and radically interoperable in order to facilitate the kinds of collaboration that can allow research and publishing to serve our highest goals and to function in accordance with our highest values.

Author: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: INKE Partnership Meeting

"In Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matilda spends hours gazing at a portrait of a knight, Alfonso the Good. She explains to her maid, “[…] some how or other my destiny is linked with something relating to him. […] I am sure there is some fatal secret at bottom.” The “fatal secret” is just one of many tropes present in the novel that came to define the genre of “terror fiction” or, as it is now more commonly known, the Gothic novel. Frederick Frank argues that, as a “prototype” for the Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto “furnishes a symbolic glossary for evoking dread, for arousing pleasure in the irrational and for establishing an iconography of an unholy and malignant cosmos governed only by absurd forces.” One of these “absurd forces” is the notion of property and the laws surrounding it. Questions about what constitutes property and what it means to own it were subjects of widespread public debate throughout the eighteenth century, a debate in which Gothic literature had a powerful voice. The uncertainty surrounding the changing economy and the tensions resulting from it are manifested in the novel’s depiction of a Gothic world, an imaginative landscape dominated by a haunted castle and founded on a fatal secret. This paper examines how the novel uses the “symbolic glossary” of the Gothic to interrogate issues of property, arguing that supernatural forces at work in the novel embody economic ideas: dead hands keeping a grip on their property from beyond the grave."

This paper introduces the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an open online space where Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders can gather to share information and resources, make connections, and build community. Situated at the intersection of the fields of digital scholarship, open access, digital humanities, and social knowledge creation, the Canadian HSS Commons is being developed as part of a research program investigating how a not-for-profit, community-partnership research commons could benefit the HSS community in Canada. This paper considers an intellectual foundation for conceptualizing the commons, its potential benefits, and its role in the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem; it explores how the Canadian HSS Commons’ open, community-based platform complements existing research infrastructure serving the Canadian HSS research community.

Cite this work: Caroline Winter, Tyler Fontenot, Luis Meneses, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, The ETCL and INKE Research Groups, 2020. "Foundations for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons: Exploring the Possibilities of Digital Research Communities." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 2 (2020-10-31). https://www.popjournal.ca/issue02/winter

Maxwell, John W. 2015. “Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2015v6n3a202

Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds. 2020. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/Reassembling-Scholarly-CommunicationsHistories.

Eve, Martin Paul. 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

El Khatib, Randa, Lindsey Seatter, Tracy El Hajj, Conrad Leibel, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, Caroline Winter, and the ETCL and INKE Research Groups. 2019. “Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 3, no. 1. http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.58