Hors-Texte: A Prototype to Support Scholarly Discussion Groups

This paper presents a design and prototype for a collaborative tool aimed at facilitating scholarly discussion and reading groups. Organized yet informal reading and discussion groups are crucial resources for many scholars in interdisciplinary fields, yet such groups are difficult to start and maintain, very difficult to learn about and join, and only rarely involve participants from multiple institutions. Simply put, greater visibility into who's reading what and a way participate in these conversations would keep interdisciplinary scholars more connected with each other and with the various fields they follow. Perhaps even more importantly, a system which could collect this information could eventually offer a view into an otherwise part of the intellectual graph not visible via citation analysis or altmetrics, providing a platform for future research. Informal academic discussion groups are poorly studied, and though this paper relies on personal experience rather than qualitative research, it represents a first step in better understanding and serving these communities.