Unpublished MRes dissertation (Institute of Education, 2011)

This dissertation reports an interview project focusing on research practices being transformed by current digital landscape. This theme constitutes an under-researched area in higher education in Italy. This small-scale and exploratory study aims to highlight overlaps, contradictions and mutual influences of traditional and new research practices as currently mediated by personal and infrastructural technologies. In particular, it intends to probe whether and to what extent actual digital scholarship's practices are affecting cultures of sharing in different research fields, prompting emergent approaches such as open publishing, open data, open education and open boundary between academia and society. The study is carried out at the University of Milan and relies on scholars' voices to draw emergent research behaviours and needs of new values, rules, training and support. That said, the study aims to: 1) identify current and emergent digital scholarly practices being undertaken by researchers working in an higher education setting, in different subject areas; 2) explore whether, in which ways and to what extent such research practices in digital environment constitute a “break” against the tradition, and how open approaches in researching and teaching are implied.

The study embeds an open research approach and consists in a series of interviews to 14 senior, young and doctoral researchers selected from different Departments. Convenience and snowball sampling strategies are applied to select informants from four different broad subject areas (Humanities, Social Sciences, Physics, Medicine). Interviews data are analyzed through comparison with previous empirical studies and by examining any implications for emerging modes of knowledge production and distribution, differences in ICTs appropriation in diverse subject areas and related problems of legitimation and motivation in part of individual researchers.