A Not So Little Side Project

Being a pioneer in digital publishing means we have plenty of experiences to share, both successful and, well, educational, but not always very many people to share them with. Although we benefit from fellow presses’ digital initiatives and they graciously keep tabs on and encourage ours, much of our work is very different and it’s hard to find or provide a model we or others can share or exchange. But it’s not just university presses who are in the business of scholarly publishing anymore.

Many university libraries, oftentimes those without an associated or formal university press of their own, are building programs to disseminate and promote the scholarship that faculty, fellows, and centers are creating within their institutions. To aid in that endeavor the Educopia Institute, a non-profit whose mission it is “to build networks and collaborative communities to help cultural, scientific, and scholarly institutions achieve greater impact,” has brought together a group of diversely experienced professionals to create a library publishing curriculum. And since library publications are increasingly digital, members of our team are helping out.

The curriculum the Educopia team  is putting together includes a wide range of modules and units covering the basics that librarians and library staff might need to know about starting and maintaining a publishing program, According to its webpage, “This project will develop and pilot a suite of synchronous and asynchronous professional development offerings for librarians that will be open and free for anyone to offer or adapt. The resulting dynamic, extensible, multimedia curriculum will empower librarians to meet local demands to launch and/or enhance scholarly publishing activities. The project is poised to have an impact on the quality and quantity of library publishing services offered to scholars and students; ultimately it will result in a healthier, more equitable publishing ecosystem.”

The piece we at SUP are helping with is the unit on publishing multimodal projects. Essentially, we are writing up lesson plans and providing supporting slides and documentation to help an instructor teach a course, whether in person or online, on what publishers of multimodal web-based projects need to consider at each stage of publication. Some of the supporting materials include the guidelines we’ve been writing about here on the blog, and which are freely available online, as well as sample documents we use in our own workflows. We’ve also put together a brief but hopefully useful reading list, including some of these blog posts.

There is no authoritative guidebook on publishing digital interactive projects, so we’ve been drawing on a variety of resources, from our educational, professional, and even recreational experiences.

We’re continuing to build the resources for the Educopia library publishing curriculum, but that not so little side project has prompted me to start putting together a more extensive bibliography that we can share here, a list that conveys the scope of our own thinking about this larger project we’ve undertaken. There is no authoritative guidebook on publishing digital interactive projects, so we’ve been drawing on a variety of resources, from our educational, professional, and even recreational experiences. Much of our learning has been empirical and experiential, but it’s often underpinned or reified by philosophical and theoretical ideas from fields like cultural preservation, humanities, computer science, and rhetoric. To advocate for digital scholarship as an equal part of the scholarly record, we need to draw from a lot of different sources. Our brief publishing curriculum bibliography is at the end of this post, and we hope to expand it into a useful resource we can embed as its own page on this blog.

This current list is only a small fraction of what’s applicable to supDigital’s larger project, and as we continue to build it, we welcome any additional suggestions from our own audience on readings you’ve found helpful when it comes to thinking about digital scholarship and publication. Please feel free to comment with recommendations or email me at jasmine.mulliken@stanford.edu.

Working Bibliography

Berry, David M., and Anders Fagerjord. Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017.

Fino-Radin, Ben. Digital Preservation Practices and the Rhizome Artbase. 2011. http://media.rhizome.org/artbase/documents/Digital-Preservation-Practices-and-the-Rhizome-ArtBase.pdf. Accessed 13 Sept. 2017.

Model Publishing Contract for Digital Scholarship. https://www.modelpublishingcontract.org/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. “Acid Free Bits.” The Electronic Literature Orgnaization, 14 June 2004, https://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html.

“The Kairos Style Guide.” Kairos: A Journal Of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/styleguide.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Library of Congress. “Recommended Formats Statement: Websites.” Preservation, https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/websites.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Paul, Christiane. “The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media.” Mediaarthistories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Boston: MIT Press, 2010. 252-274.

Rosenthal, David S.H. Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies, a report commissioned by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York, October 2015, https://mellon.org/Rosenthal-Emulation-2015

Rumsey, Abby Smith. When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016.

“Submission Guidelines for Digital Projects.” SX Archipelagos, http://smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/submission-guidelines.html#submission-guidelines-for-digital-projects. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summers, Ed, and Ricardo Punzalan. “Bots, Seeds, and People: Web Archives As Infrastructure.” CSCW 25 Feb.-1 Mar. 2017 Portland, OR. ACM 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998345. Accessed 13 Sept. 2017.