Are Libraries Still Relevant?
Assessing Digital Humanities Tools- Use of Scalar at a Research University
Collaboration, Consultation, or Transaction
COLLABORATION: Digital humanities project showcase
Commentary on Digital Publishing in African American Studies- Continuing the Dialogue and Expanding the Collaborations
Digital humanities in the library isn't a service
Digital Humanities: New Roles for Libraries
Digital Publishing Seen from the Digital Humanities
Getting Started with Omeka - A Tutorial
How to evaluate digital scholarship
http://ceball.com/
Humanities Scholars and Library-Based Digital Publishing
Open Access Publishing
"Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy", Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Promoting Diversity and Sustainability in the Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem_ The University of Michigan's MPublishing Redefines the Role of Libraries in Publishing
Publishing Without Walls
Race, memory, and the digital humanities conference W&M 2017
Scalar 2.0 — Trailer
Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities - Making The Modernist Archives Publishing Project
Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries Scalability and Sustainability
Tenure, promotion and digital publication.
The Historian's Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia
The humanities center: Fostering interdisciplinary collaboration
The Necessity of Digital Publishing in Exploring the Black Experience
Using DH tools to examine neglected indigenous texts
Using social media to promote academic research- Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work
What 'counts'?
When does service become scholarship?
WordPress Tutorial for Beginners 2020 - How to Create Your First WordPress Website
Digital Publishing in the Humanities
Overview
Digital culture is changing. Social technologies are impacting how scholars work, learn and engage with one another both inside and outside of their institutions. In postsecondary education, it is becoming increasingly vital to share your work and practice online. Open and digital channels help colleagues solicit advice, seek out support/collaboration, offer free professional development, share information and resources, and learn in networked communities with common interests. Besides developing a digital presence, higher education staff, administrators and scholars are utilizing social media and digital technologies to support their work, add to their professional development, engage with peers, learn in the collective and publicly in digital spaces and places. Using openly licensed content, this OER helps fill the gap between the digital divide and familiarizes users with the digital publishing world. By using this OER, students and professional scholars alike will gain insight into how to use digital publishing tools to their advantage, have a better understanding of the challenges surrounding digital publishing, and learn how to create and engage in innovative and collaborative digital projects.
Open Educational Resource Narrative
Overview:
We are currently living in a digital age in which access to the internet has connected us to an almost unlimited amount of information. As a result, the manner in which research is shared and communicated among scholars is changing rapidly. This Open Educational Resource was created with the intention to help college students understand how digital publishing is contributing to those changes.
Need for Resource:
Digital culture is changing. Social technologies are impacting how scholars work, learn and engage with one another both inside and outside of their institutions. In postsecondary education, it is becoming increasingly vital to share your work and practice online. Open and digital channels help colleagues solicit advice, seek out support/collaboration, offer free professional development, share information and resources, and learn in networked communities with common interests. Besides developing a digital presence, higher education staff, administrators and scholars are utilizing social media and digital technologies to support their work, add to their professional development, engage with peers, learn in the collective and publicly in digital spaces and places. Using openly licensed content, this OER helps fill the gap between the digital divide and familiarizes users with the digital publishing world. By using this OER, students and professional scholars alike will gain insight into how to use digital publishing tools to their advantage, have a better understanding of the challenges surrounding digital publishing, and learn how to create and engage in innovative and collaborative digital projects.
Methodology:
This OER uses a combination of guided readings, digital projects, discussion questions, and videos to help users understand issues related to digital publishing. Additionally, the instructor view of this OER contains summaries of the readings, answer prompts, and learning objectives to help teachers guide students as they work. By presenting this information through a range of resources, it will showcase how diverse digital publishing activities can be, and it will give students an opportunity to explore different styles of learning (logical, physical, social, etc.). Although these questions and activities were designed to facilitate conversations among students, the majority of the work in this OER can be completed individually or in a classroom setting.
Learning Objectives:
Because this OER is an introductory tool that encourages exploration and working at one's own pace, a formal assessment of students' knowledge, such as taking a summative exam, seems counterproductive. Instead, learning objectives for these materials should be measured through student self-assessment. Student self-assessment are methods that allow students to rate their own confidence in their work and their understanding of course content. Throughout each section of this OER, there are prompts for students to reflect on their learning and think about remaining questions they have about a given topic. Instructors should these reflection posts to gauge the effectiveness of this resource and the growth in knowledge of their students.
What is Digital Publishing in the Humanities?
Readings:
I chose these readings because all of the articles focus on introducing the concept of digital publishing and current trends within the digital humanities and digital publishing fields. The first two readings discuss the transition from print to digital within scholarly communication and how that shift impacts humanities scholars. The last two readings are more narrowly focused, discussing the effect of open access in digital publishing and offering recommendations for how library publishers can help humanities scholars reach broader audiences through interdisciplinary and open access publishing.
After reading these articles, students should have working definitions of key digital publishing terms, have a better understanding of the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches, and have an introductory-level understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with digital publishing.
Activities:
I developed these activities for students because they facilitate the exploration of digital publishing topics and resources. The first activity is intended to help students become familiar with examples of digital publishers and issues and controversies surrounding digital publishing. The second activity is intended to give students the opportunity to analyze and critique an online humanities journal. The third activity allows students to explore digital publishing using their own interests as a catalyst, and, hopefully, the range of projects students choose to research will show have diverse and varied digital publishing is.
Discussion Question with Answer Prompts:
- What can you do with Digital Publishing?
- Advantages
- Develop a personal research or project website
- Create a private course blog
- Write an interactive, "Choose Your Own Adventure"-like story
- Incorporate media and text to develop a narrative
- Generate tutorials or reusable resources for your classroom
- Disadvantage
- Link Rot
- Advantages
- Do you consider social media a digital publishing medium for academic works? Why or why not?
- Yes
- Social media provide academics with one of the most direct routes for sharing their work.
- social media can overcome resource gaps and mitigate social inequalities across a variety of domains
- No
- Too informal
- No established system of peer review
- social media replicates pre-existing structural inequalities and simply rewards those who have more resources and status
- Yes
- What digital projects are you interested in exploring?
- If students are not responsive to this question or are slow to participate, explore digital projects on the Library of Congress website. Giving students examples of well researched and reviewed projects might help spark an interest in them.
Additional Resources:
These resources are meant to help introduce students to resources that analyze issues related to digital humanities and digital publishing more in-depth. Both the Fitzpatrick video and the Batterhshill et al. article address the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches. They also are both provocation tools that will, hopefully, help students think more broadly about digital publishing and it will affect the future of academia. Ultimately, I put these works in the "Additional Resources" section because they are full length videos and books, so I wanted to give students the option to look through them on their own time.
Overview:
When we talk about the value chain of scholarly communication, one important aspect to consider is that of the publisher of academic work. Due to the impact of digital publishing, people who are not traditional publishers are increasingly able to fulfill that function. For instance, scholars are becoming publishers, as they publish their work on their personal websites or blogs. Libraries are becoming publishers when they use the content in their repositories to create online journals. Depending on how one interprets the word "publisher," Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia can even be considered digital publishers.
Beyond democratizing the publication process, digital publishing has presented a plethora of opportunities for modern researchers. For example, emergent technologies are providing academics with new ways to present scholarship without the constraints of print formats, such as online monographs, journals, exhibits, webpages, and audio or visual projects. Additionally, digital publishing has made it easier for scholars to communicate with their peers and collaborate on projects, and it has given a platform for marginalized and underrepresented scholars to promote their work.
However, digital publishing has also presented new challenges within the academic world. While both journal and monograph publishing have established ecosystems of peer review and accreditation, currently there are no formal channels for publication or consistent peer review standards for digital projects. Furthermore, digital publications tend to be less stable than print materials, causing some digital scholars to worry whether their work will still be available and shareable in perpetuity.
Using the resources and activities below, begin your investigation into the world of digital publishing.
Readings:
SODP Staff. (2019, July 25). Digital trends: The future of scholarly communications. State of Digital Publishing. https://www.stateofdigitalpublishing.com/opinion/the-future-of-scholarly-communication/.
Borgman, C. (2009). The digital future is now: A call to action for the humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(4). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/4/000077/000077.html.
Fitzpatrick, K. (2013). Open access publishing. In D. Cohen & T. Scheinfeldt (Eds.), Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities. University of Michigan, 35-38. Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65swj3.11.
Fenlon, K., Senseney, M., Bonn, M., & Swatscheno, J. (2019). "Humanities scholars and library-based digital publishing: New forms of publication, new audiences, new publishing roles." Journal of Scholarly Publishing 50(1), 159-182. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.50.3.01.
Activities:
- Google digital publishing projects. What projects, books, and journals appear? What do these resources have in common? What is different about them?
- Explore the Digital Humanities Quarterly website. What are its strengths as a digital journal? What are its weaknesses?
- Search your university's digital publishing resources. Where would you go to learn more about digital publishing at your university? Who would you direct your questions to? How could these resources be further developed?
Discussion Questions:
- What is the value of an online humanities resource as opposed to print resources? What are the disadvantages
- Do you consider social media a digital publishing medium for academic works? Why or why not?
- What digital projects are you interested in exploring?
Reflection:
What aspect of digital publishing mosts interests you? What initial questions do you have about digital publishing?
Additional Resources:
Claire Battershill, Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Michael Widner, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, & Nicola Wilson. (2017). Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making The Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Palgrave Macmillan. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1520214.
Fitzpatrick, K. [Hall Center]. (2017, April 14). Planned obsolescence: Publishing, technology, and the future of the academy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH-n9wyBi14&ab_channel=HallCenter.
Digital Publishing Tools Overview
Readings:
I chose these readings because they both revolve around how the digital revolution has transformed the writing of history. Wolff's article focuses more on the digital shift from print materials to online tools, Tracy's article focuses more on how universities can incorporate digital publishing technology into their libraries, and the "Using Social Media..." article conveys the idea that social media can be used as an academic publishing platform. Instructors can use both of these articles to introduce their students to the concept of digital publishing and the tools researchers might use to publish their work.
After reading these articles, students should have a greater understanding of why humanities scholarship has largely transitioned from print publishing to digital publishing, and they know how academic libraries promote the use of digital publishing. Ideally, knowing how libraries use digital publishing tools will encourage students to learn more about specific digital publishing programs/tools/etc. within their own universities.
Activities:
These activities are meant to help students gain hands-on experience with different digital publishing platforms. Additionally, by analyzing examples of different digital publishing projects, it should help broaden students' understanding of what digital publishing in the humanities can be.
Discussion Question with Answer Prompts:
How do digital publishing tools give more agency to scholars over the creation and dissemination of their research? How do digital publishing tools create obstacles for scholars?
More Agency
Cost-Effective Publishing
Provides an Interactive Reading Experience to Users
Wider Reach
Obstacles
Many digital projects rely on the effort and expertise of more than one individual (IT, copyright issues, programmers, etc.)
- What is the process of deciding which tool is best for your project? What types of questions should you ask yourself to determine which digital publishing tool is right for you?
- Questions to ask yourself
- What type of data am I working with?
- How do I want visitors to interact with my data?
- How will my work be evaluated?
- Will I be collaborating on this project with other researchers? Does this publishing tool have a seamless sharing process?
- Questions to ask yourself
Additional Resources:
These resources are meant to help students gain a deeper understanding of different digital publishing tools. For example, the article Specifically, the video tutorials are meant to guide students as they start using the digital publishing platform of their choice. I decided to include the videos in the additional resources section because rather than having students watch all the videos, I thought it would be better to allow to focus on watching tutorials for the tools they are most interested in.
Overview:
Digital humanities publishing tools are changing what it means to create and share scholarly objects and publications. Digital publishing platforms allow users to share artifacts and research to wider audiences, collaborate in new ways, and rethink how libraries, museums, and exhibits should be structured.
One benefit of digital publishing tools is that they are shifting the dissemination of humanities research from a “pull” model to a “push” model. A pull model requires people who are interested in ongoing humanities research to search through publications to obtain the information. In the pull model, the audience must have the initiative to find specific research. On the other hand, a push model allows scholars to transmit the information more directly to potentially interested parties. In the push model, it is the researcher who initiates communication with the audience. That level of agency and the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research are attractive to scholars and suggests that digital publishing tools can help promote research across disciplines.
However, one potential challenge to using digital publishing tools is, depending on which tool you use, it might require some prior publishing knowledge. For example, to use the e-book file format EPUB, users will need to be quite familiar with the syntax of XML and XHTML. While not all digital publishing tools demand a strong background in coding, some users may find learning how to use different publishing platforms difficult.
Because different digital publishing tools have different purposes, experience levels, interactivity, and engagement, it is important to let your digital project dictate which tool you use. Regardless of which tool you use, some important items to consider include:
- Data exportability – can visitors easily download, share, and cite your research?
- Self-expression – how can you personalize your project to make it stand out from other articles, websites, videos, etc.?
- Resources and training – can you easily find resource guides, videos, tutorials, and other useful information to help with sharing your project online?
Using the resources and activities below, explore different digital publishing tools and determine which ones might fit best with your interests.
Readings:
Tracy, D. (2016). Assessing Digital Humanities Tools: Use of Scalar at a Research University. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 16(1), 165-191. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/88908.
Wolff, R. (2013). The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia. In J. Dougherty & K. Nawrotzki (Eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age. (pp. 64-74). University of Michigan Press. http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctv65sx57.10.
Klar S., Krupnikov Y., Ryan J.B., Searles K., Shmargad Y. (2020). "Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work." PLOS ONE, 15(4). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229446.
Activities:
Explore these different digital publishing tools. Which one most interests you? What types of projects might be each tool be best suited for?
- Omeka
- Omeka is an open source platform commonly used by librarians, archivists, and museum professionals to create dynamic online exhibits that showcase collections of digital images, text, and other multi-media formats in one seamless site. There is a basic version of the software that can be hosted through the web and a more advanced version that requires web-hosting from an institution.
- Example project using Omeka: Digital Jane Austen
- Scalar
- Scalar is an online platform designed for humanities scholars to create “books” that re-imagine publishing, visual presentations, and linked information. It allows users to design media-rich, non-linear publications that utilize extensive tagging.
- Example project using Scalar: Making the Perfect Record
- WordPress
- WordPress is a popular, open source blogging platform that has digital humanities plugins such as Comment Press and Future of the Book.
- Example project using WordPress: The Uses of Scale in Literary Study
Discussion Questions:
How do digital publishing tools give more agency to scholars over the creation and dissemination of their research? How do digital publishing tools create obstacles for scholars?
What is the process of deciding which tool is best for your project? What types of questions should you ask yourself to determine which digital publishing tool is right for you?
Reflection:
Which digital publishing tool is your favorite? Would you want to publish any current projects you are working on using any of these tools?
Additional Resources:
Surfside PPC. (2019, November 11). WordPress Tutorial for Beginners 2020 - How to Create Your First WordPress Website [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwiEcmbPjo0&ab_channel=SurfsidePPC.
Kimberly Arleth. (2016, March 6). Getting Started with Omeka - A Tutorial [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FncO08PeK9o&ab_channel=KimberlyArleth.
VectorsJournal. (2016, October 16). Scalar 2.0 — Trailer [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6k4IpSOgHY&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=vectorsjournal.
Collaboration
Readings:
I chose these readings because they all analyze different aspects of collaboration within digital publishing. McGrath's article is more introspective and tracks her progression from a humanities student who did not value collaboration to a journalist who views collaboration as a major asset. This type of article is targeted at humanities students who are either unfamiliar with collaboration or are hesitant to commit themselves to collaborative projects. Once they have been introduced to humanities collaboration, Tzoc's article is intended to provide students with examples of digital projects and spark curiosity. Finally, Blanke, Pierazzo, and Stokes' article is more technical and will teach students how to think about digital publishing and collaboration in new ways (e.g., as a range of ongoing activities).
After reading these articles, students should have a better understanding of why collaboration in the humanities field is important. They should also know how digital publishing has enhanced collaboration efforts in the humanities.
Activities:
In order to be effective collaborators, students will need to learn how to have strong communication and organization skills. These activities are meant to help students become familiar with different project management tools and strengthen their interpersonal skills. After gaining some hands-on experience with these tools, students have a better idea of how to develop a collaboration plan that is sustainable, organized, and well thought-out.
Discussion Question with Answer Prompts:
- Besides sharing skills and experiences, how else might humanities scholars benefit from collaboration?
- One major benefit of collaboration is that it reveals your processes and assumptions about research and writing
- Collaborative writing groups can function like a regular peer-review process
- Collaboration will teach you who you are as a colleague and partner
- What challenges to collaboration have you faced in your academic career so far? What are some techniques to teach collaboration skills in an educational environment?
- Potential Challenges:
- Ineffective Meetings: Meetings without structure can cause people to have conversations that spin without purpose
- Little Transparency or Inadequate Information Sharing: When you have team members whose work depends on that of other team members, they need to share their progress, concerns, and barriers
- Conflicting Styles of Decision Making: People process information differently. Some people process information quickly and are able to respond with an answer right away. Some people need to process away from the group and think slowly through all the options. Styles of decision making can differ significantly and cause eruptions of frustration
- Potential Techniques to Teach Collaboration Skills:
- Institute a “We All Answer” Policy: Make your policy that everyone in a group should offer a suggestion while brainstorming. This helps groups avoid having one person dominate conversation
- Institute a “No Bad Ideas” Policy: Write everything your group comes up with - regardless of how outlandish - down on paper and give it a chance without judgment. This encourages team members to think creatively without rejection, which gives them confidence.
- Potential Challenges:
- What are some ways you might approach a person to initiate collaboration with them? How do digital approaches for collaboration differ from in-person approaches?
- Build a good online resume and update it frequently
- Join social networks such as ResearchGate
- Share ideas, files and publications and be active in asking and responding questions
- Contact appropriate people and share your topics with them
Additional Resources:
These resources are meant to showcase collaborative digital humanities projects and resources. The UBC video is intended to allow students to hear digital humanists discuss the collaborative process in their own words. The University of Rochester video is meant to introduce students to an example of a digital humanities collaborative space. After watching these videos, students will hopefully have a deeper understanding of how to initiate, plan, and create interdisciplinary humanities projects.
Overview:
Collaboration is on the upswing in the humanities. The rise of digital publishing has heralded a new frontier in scholarship and research communications, as digital publishing platforms offer innovative ways for researchers to collaborate, communicate, and share their research discoveries with peers. However, because of the stereotypically isolating nature of research, collaboration can be a tough sell to graduate students in the humanities. They are not taught how to collaborate effectively, and it can be hard to see what stands to be gained when monographs and journal articles are widely viewed as the standards for success.
Thus, digital publishing is helping to break down those barriers to collaboration in two major ways. First, digital publishing in the humanities questions the assumption about what humanities publishing should look like. Traditionally, humanities publishing is focused around creating scholarly monographs, articles, or faithful visual representations of media. However, as advancements technology allow for allow dynamic flexibility in data visualization, humanities researchers are now starting to view publishing as a range of modelling activities that aim to develop and communicate interpretations. Instead of generating scholarship with the limitation that it must conform to the expectations of either a book or a journal article, digital publishing enables scholars to create digital projects that communicate their work in whatever way works best for them.
Second, digital publishing is creating opportunities for collaboration among multidisciplinary groups including researchers, scholars, students, technologists, and librarians. For example, some academic libraries have created digital publishing centers to help students and faculty become more familiar with the process of publishing an e-book. Projects like these lay the groundwork for continued collaborations and connections among the library, classroom learning, and academic scholarship and require knowledge and experience that extends through disciplinary boundaries and across academic units. Thus, through collaboration, scholars are able to to fill skills gaps and develop expertise and community around a given topic.
Using the resources and activities below, explore various forms of collaboration within digital publishing and think about digital projects you would like to develop that might require interdisciplinary collaboration.
Readings:
McGrath, L. (2013, September 3). Collaboration in the Humanities. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/collaboration-humanities.
Tzoc, E. (2016). Libraries and faculty collaboration: Four digital scholarship examples. Journal of Web Librarianship, 10(2), 124–136. 10.1080/19322909.2016.1150229.
Blanke, T., Pierazzo, E., & Stokes, P. (2014). Digital publishing seen from the digital humanities. Logos, 25(2), 16-27. https://doi.org/10.1163/1878-4712-11112041.
Activities:
As previously discussed, digital publishing has created new opportunities for collaboration among multidisciplinary groups. But what if you're not sure how to start planning collaborative projects? Below are three examples of potential resources you might use to initiate digital collaboration. Click on the links to learn more about each resource. Think of different scenarios/projects where it might be beneficial to use each resource. Choose your favorite resource of these three and write how you might use it to help manage an upcoming project of yours.
- DevDH.org - Development for the Digital Humanities
- Developed by Jennifer Guiliano and Simon Appleford, with contributions from many others, this site provides a series of lectures that cover different stages of a project, including translating research questions into digital projects, teams and partners, publicity, budgets, and more
- The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap
- The STSR is housed in the Visual Media Workshop at University of Pittsburgh and is a "structured group exercise that guides participants through the process of creating effective sustainability plans" for digital projects. It is designed as a series of modules that help project teams plan and create social and technical infrastructure that will ensure the sustainability and preservation of digital work
- PM4DH: Project Management for the Digital Humanities
- The PM4DH is a guide to project management developed by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. It is organized into five phases: proposal, initiation, planning, execution, and closing. The "Create a Workplan" section under the Execution phase includes a variety of templates that can be used to document project risks, issues, communication plans, meeting summaries, and more
Discussion Questions:
- Besides sharing skills and experiences, how else might humanities scholars benefit from collaboration?
- What challenges to collaboration have you faced in your academic career so far? What are some techniques to teach collaboration skills in an educational environment?
- What are some ways you might approach a person to initiate collaboration with them?
Reflection:
What aspects of digital collaboration do you enjoy the most? What ideas for digital projects do you have after reading these articles?
Additional Resources:
UBC-V Public Humanities Hub. (2020, November 3). COLLABORATION: Digital humanities project showcase [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oNTDR6AOs4&ab_channel=UBC-VPublicHumanitiesHub.
University of Rochester. (2017, March 7). The humanities center: Fostering interdisciplinary collaboration [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvLE042R9FU&ab_channel=UniversityofRochester.
Libraries + Digital Publishing Services
Readings:
I chose these readings because they all have different perspectives on how libraries should support digital publishing, and they explore different aspects of digital publishing in libraries. For example, both Muñoz's and Vinopal & McCormick's articles focus on developing sustainable digital publishing programs in libraries. However, Vinopal & McCormick's article argues that libraries should build their digital publishing programs around patrons' projects while Muñoz argues that libraries should focus on helping librarians lead by example and create their own DH initiatives and projects. Additionally, Green's focuses on how libraries can build infrastructure to support innovative scholarly publishing, and Hawkins' article examines how the shift from physical to virtual publishing has impacted libraries from a financial standpoint.
After reading these articles, students should have a better understanding of how libraries create and support digital publishing initiatives. These readings should also give students greater insight into how digital publishing works from the librarian's perspective. Ideally, this knowledge will help students in planning their own publications and working with digital librarians.
Activities:
These activities are meant to help students understand how libraries are translating traditional library services into digital ones. By investigating different library publishing programs, students will be able to see first-hand how libraries, on their own or in collaboration with their university presses, are publishing open access journals, developing subscription-based journal publishing programs, publishing monographs and conference proceedings, and digitizing and publishing parts of their physical collections.
Discussion Question with Answer Prompts:
- Why do you think libraries are increasingly involved in scholarly publishing?
- For-profit models of publishing are becoming more costly for users and institutions
- The rise of digital technologies has catalyzed new modes of dissemination
- Shrinking funding for university presses and scholarly publishers constrains their ability to meet needs for promotion and tenure demands and scholarly publication
- Why types of digital publishing issues can librarians help scholars with?
- Content Creation: Librarians can assist scholars develop their ideas and gather content for their research and digital publication
- Content Management: Librarians have the expertise to help scholars plan the organization and curation of their digital content
- Dissemination: With digital publications, there’s a multitude of ways that people can discover, access, and cite research. Libraries are engaged in the technical structures and workflows around research impacts, alternative metrics for tracking publications, and presentations in new venues, such as social media
- What publishing resources exist within your library? What publishing resources would you like to see your library implement?
- Answers may vary
Additional Resources:
These resources are meant to give students an in-depth look at how libraries are responding to the rise in digital scholarship. After reviewing these resources, students should understand how libraries are using digital publishing services to keep up with the changing demands of their patrons.
Overview:
Digital publishing is redefining role of libraries in facilitating new modes of scholarly communications and publication among researchers. Openly accessible forms of scholarly publication can enable scholars to reach new audiences, foster understandings, and find ways for their research to impact society and people in broader ways beyond what scholars normally anticipate. While this trend has made sharing information easier, it has also presented new challenges for academic libraries in terms of how they provide services for digital scholarship and publishing.
One benefit of the rise of digital publishing is it has allowed librarians to provide a broad clientele with relatively easy-to-use solutions for many digital research needs. Furthermore, it has enabled librarians to take a more holistic and innovative approach to their work. For example, in today’s scholarly landscape, there is an exponentially increasing number of open access publications and data repositories that provide cost-effective and more democratic ways for scholars to engage in publishing and disseminating scholarship to public audiences. As a result, modern librarians are engaging more fully in scholarly research workflows. By connecting to new points in the research life cycle librarians can bring a host of expertise and resources to help faculty realize their scholarship and publication in new ways.
Despite this breadth of services and expertise, librarians find themselves challenged to respond effectively to an ever-growing number of requests for web-based spaces and tools to collaborate on scholarly research. For example, although scholars often underestimate the complexity of their publishing requests by describing their needs using the catch-all term "website," such requests actually represent a diverse set of activities which may be achieved in a variety of ways: with a wiki or basic blog, with more complex tools like a custom-designed database with public or private web access, integration with platforms elsewhere, or some combination of all of these. Support for these projects can be equally varied and may require anything from a single consultation about available enterprise-level tools, to semester-long training and advice for a course's student projects, or an open ended commitment to implement a new tool or manage a scholarly digital collection.
Using the resources and activities below, explore how librarians are responding to different aspects of publishing in the digital age. As you read through these case studies, think about why innovative digital initiatives and services successfully develop at some institutions and how librarians support the development of those initatives.
Readings:
Muñoz, T. (2012). Digital Humanities in the Library Isn’t a Service. Trevor Muñoz: Writing. http://trevormunoz.com/notebook/2012/08/19/doing-dh-in-the-library.html.
Vinopal, J., & McCormick, M. (2013). Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability. Journal of Library Administration, 53(1), 27–42. 10.1080/01930826.2013.756689.
Green, H. (2017). Publishing without walls: Building a collaboration to support digital publishing at the university of illinois. Fire!!!, 3(2), 21-36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/fire.3.2.0021.
Hawkins, K. (2012). Promoting diversity and sustainability in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: The university of michigan's mpublishing redefines the role of libraries in publishing. Educational Technology, 52(6), 8-10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44430191.
Activities:
Explore these digital library publishing programs. How do these programs engage with their patrons? How do they take a holistic approach to librarianship?
- Library Publishing Directory
- This annual directory, complied and published by the Library Publishing Coalition, documents the publishing activities of academic and research libraries, including information about the number and types of publications they produce, the services they offer authors, how they are staffed and funded, and their future plans.
- Library Publishing Toolkit
- The Library Publishing Toolkit looks at the broad and varied landscape of library publishing through discussions, case studies, and shared resources. From supporting writers and authors in the public library setting to hosting open access journals and books, this collection examines opportunities for libraries to leverage their position and resources to create and provide access to content.
- Professional Development Opportunities
- Developed and maintained by the Library Publishing Coalition, this guide provides links to courses, webinars, and videos relevant to library publishing.
- SPARC Guide to Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships
- This comprehensive guide from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) helps libraries, presses, and academic units to define effective partnerships capable of supporting innovative approaches to campus-based publishing.
Discussion question:
- Why do you think libraries are increasingly involved in scholarly publishing?
- Why types of digital publishing issues can librarians help scholars with?
- What publishing resources exist within your library? What publishing resources would you like to see your library implement?
Reflection:
What programs do you think libraries should implement to promote the use of digital publishing tools? What questions do you still have about the role libraries play in publishing digital scholarship?
Additional Resources:
Rutgers CommInfo. (2014, March 20). Digital Humanities: New Roles for Libraries [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNWODM9SK9M&ab_channel=RutgersCommInfo.
Bartlett, L. [TEDXTalk]. (2020, January 8). Are Libraries Still Relevant? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG7zYoUq_bs&ab_channel=TEDxTalks.
Evaluating Digital Scholarship
Readings:
I chose these readings because they all center around the ideas of what counts as digital scholarship, why tenure is important for scholars, and how to evaluate the academic merits of a piece of digital scholarship. Sample's article argues that digital scholarship is simply a creative or intellectual act that it is public and circulates in a community of peers that evaluates and builds upon it. Stark's article builds on that idea by considering how departments are evaluating digital scholarship and informing young scholars of what the review process. Raben's article delves more deeply into why obtaining tenure matters and why electronic media is not as highly regarded by the gatekeepers of tenure. Finally, Presner's article discusses possible guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in the humanities.
After reading these articles, students should have a better understanding of how universities' reluctance to fully embrace digital scholarship as profound scholarship limits scholars in the projects they choose to pursue. Furthermore, students should become more familiar with publishers, scholars, and other institutions that are leading the way in helping the academic establishment recognize the value of online publication.
Activities:
These activities are meant to help students see what guidelines currently exist for evaluating digital scholarship. Although there are no universal standards for digital evaluation, students are encouraged to investigate the similarities and differences between these organizations' standards and determine what a strong, standardized set of guidelines might look like. Ideally, analyzing these guidelines, students will be prompted to develop their own standards for evaluation.
Discussion Question with Answer Prompts:
- What guidelines do you think review committees should follow when evaluating digital scholarship?
- Nature of Digital Projects
- How does the digital component contribute something that couldn’t otherwise be communicated?
- Collaboration
- Did the project consult outside experts to assess the project’s content and technical structure?
- How does the project relate with other digital scholarship projects?
- Usability
- Does the project use accepted standards for web design, metadata, and encoding?
- Sustainability
- How does the project address issues of digital preservation?
- Is there documentation or is the site code made available?
- Other Considerations
- Was the project grant funded?
- Did the project result in any conference presentations or print publications?
- Nature of Digital Projects
- Research your institutions guidelines promotion and tenure review process. Is the process inclusive of digital scholarship? What guidelines do you agree with, and which guidelines might you want to change?
- Write up your own guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. Discuss how you wrote your guidelines with a partner.
- Answers may vary
Additional Resources:
These resources are intended to provide students with some examples of what a digital portfolio might look like for a scholar and what an online review committee might look like for a university. After engaging with these resources, students should have greater insight into how to share and submit their digital work for review and how a review committee undergoes the process of acquiring, evaluating, editing, producing, publishing, delivering, marketing, and preserving interactive scholarly works.
Overview:
To receive tenure college and university professors have long been required to write scholarly monographs or articles, engage in serious research, and teach effectively. In recent years, however, the emergence of digital scholarship has revolutionized, and complicated, the publishing and tenure processes in unexpected ways.
For example, the question of what “counts” as scholarship has become critical in higher education. As new electronic media have enabled academics to communicate scholarly material in innovative formats, scholars have attempted to determine what when a piece of work—service, teaching, editing, mentoring, coding, etc.—become scholarship. While some academics have a more liberal definition of what counts as scholarship than others, the rise in digital publishing has helped lend credibility to more untraditional forms of research.
Despite this transformation led by digital technology, many universities and institutions have not integrated new forms of scholarship into hiring, tenure and promotion guidelines. Furthermore, of the institutions that do have evaluation practices for digital scholarship, they tend to vary widely from department to department and university to university. Since the evaluation standards for digital humanities work is so varied and most reviewers familiar with evaluating traditional, document-based forms of publishing, many faculty in the humanities are disincentivized from publishing digital humanities work. As a result, most digital-born and collaborative work tends to be done by faculty who have already received tenure. Thus, for faculty with little experience with digital humanities work, the task of creating, defending, and evaluating said work can be daunting.
Using the resources below, learn about different institutions' standards for evaluating digital scholarship. As you read through these articles, reflect on why it might be important for libraries and universities develop guidelines for evaluating digital-born scholarship.
Readings:
Sample, M. (2013). When does service become scholarship?. WordPress. https://www.samplereality.com/2013/02/08/when-does-service-become-scholarship/.
Starkman, R. (2013). What 'counts'?. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2013/02/20/essay-issues-related-what-digital-scholarship-counts-tenure-and-promotion.
Raben, J. (2007). Tenure, promotion and digital publication. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 1(1). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/1/000006/000006.html.
Presner, T. (2012). How to evaluate digital scholarship. Journal of Digital Humanities, 1(4). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/how-to-evaluate-digital-scholarship-by-todd-presner/.
Activities:
While there currently are no universal standards for evaluating digital humanities work, there are a couple of central figures leading conversations about the need for such baseline ideas. Several of these organizations and their guidelines for tenure review committees on evaluating digital humanities scholarship and collaborative projects are below. Look through these organizations' standards. Think about which recommendations you like or dislike and why.
- Modern Language Association
- Principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA has developed guidelines designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form
- American Historical Association
- Oldest professional association of historians in the United States. The AHA has created guidelines for the professional evaluation of digital scholarship by historians to help clarify the policies associated with the evaluation of scholarly work in digital forms
- George Mason University
- Public research university that has extended some of the tenure review principles to evaluating graduate-level work
Discussion Questions:
- What guidelines do you think review committees should follow when evaluating digital scholarship?
- Research your institutions guidelines promotion and tenure review process. Is the process inclusive of digital scholarship? What guidelines do you agree with, and which guidelines might you want to change?
- Write up your own guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. Discuss how you wrote your guidelines with a partner.
Reflect:
What do you think about these conversations related what should "count" as scholarly work? What questions do you still have about tenure and digital publishing?
Additional Resources:
Ball, Cheryl. Tenure portfolio, done digitally with primarily digital scholarship. http://ceball.com/.
Harvey, A. (2019). A Digital Publishing Initiative. Stanford University. https://blog.supdigital.org/press-release/.
Marginalized Communities + Digital Publishing
Readings:
These readings all center around the necessity of digital publishing for scholars who explore issues related to marginalized communities. Fenton's article discusses the work of five digital humanities scholars whose research is pioneering new approaches to the digital humanities scholarship. Harris's article argues for accessible and credible platforms for publishing media-rich scholarship centering Blackness. McClaurin's article provides commentary on her experiences as a black woman scholar within the Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies disciplines have compelled her to move towards digital publishing tool. Finally, Wernimont's introduction to a Feminisms and Digital Humanities special issue challenges readers to use digital publishing to redefine the humanities disciplines.
After reading these articles, students should gain deeper insights into why diversity in humanities research is important and how digital publishing is making research more accessible. Furthermore, students should begin to see how digital publishing has the potential to facilitate the creation and dissemination of transformative work in the humanities fields.
Activities:
These activities are meant to expose students to digital projects that are created by marginalized people and focus on telling the histories of underrepresented groups. After gaining hands-on experience with these projects and analyzing how these scholars take advantage of the digital space to preserve and communicate history, students should have a better understanding of how digital publishing helps give marginalized and underrepresented scholars a platform to promote their work.
Discussion Question with Answer Prompts:
- Why do you think digital publishing might give more options for scholars with marginalized identities to share their work as opposed to publishing in a more traditional medium, like a journal article?
- Academic journals rely upon gaining acceptance from others who may have vested interests in the status quo, so it may be useful to seek other outlets.
- Beyond giving scholars more opportunities for publishing, how else can the digital humanities discipline amplify marginalized voices?
- Making a concerted effort to include underrepresented people in review committees, editor boards, etc.
Additional Resources:
These resources are intended to give students the opportunity to hear how scholars discuss diversity and inclusion in a conference setting. After listening to scholars discuss how they used digital publishing tools to analyze research related to marginalized communities, students should have a better idea of how to lead and facilitate conversations about race, gender, sexuality, etc. in the humanities fields with their peers.
Overview:
The digital humanities have supported a remarkable diversity of teaching, scholarship and service. In addition to introducing scholars to innovative ways to conduct research, publish work, and communicate with other scholars, digital humanities asks scholars to think about the construction of race, gender, class, sexuality and nation through representations and absences in the cultural archive, examining that archive both in close detail and at massive scale, and using new forms of scholarly production and collaboration to draw others into the project as well. Some of the most impactful ways the digital humanities is promoting such work is through providing new, virtual space for marginalized communities to interact with one another and publish their work to wider audiences.
The opportunity for interaction is especially prevalent among younger scholars and scholars who are active on social media. For instance, a 2016 study conducted by the Nielsen Company found that African American Millennials are driving social change and leading digital advancement, raising awareness about issues ranging from social activism to diversifying television programming and more. In traditional print scholarship, communicating the full context of these online posts would be a challenge for humanities scholars. The nature of social media environments requires more than an analysis of an image: the entire post, conversation thread, and hashtag stream that a user accesses must be considered. However, through digital publishing, these valid forms of expression are able to be captured in full and the potential of scholars who interrogate these types of sources are not limited.
Additionally, the accessibility of digital publishing makes it easier for scholars to create articles, special issues, and other projects that critique the humanities disciplines and push the field to be more inclusive. The transformative digital humanities will not be found only among the members of marginalized communities. Nor will it be found only where the funding is and where the easily recognized and intensively supported digital humanities projects are. Rather, the humanities have the potential to be transformed into a more diverse and inclusive discipline through the intersection of these two areas; an intersection that is made possible through digital publishing.
Using the resources below, examine how humanities scholars from marginalized communities are using digital publishing tools to share their work.
Readings:
Fenton, W. (2017). The new wave in digital humanities. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/08/02/rising-stars-digital-humanities.
Harris, F. (2017). The necessity of digital publishing in exploring the black experience. Fire!!!, 3(3), 66-79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/fire.3.2.0066.
McClaurin, I. (2017). Commentary on Digital Publishing in African American Studies: Continuing the Dialogue and Expanding the Collaborations. Fire!!!, 3(2), 80-103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/fire.3.2.0080.
Wernimont, J. (2015). Introduction to Feminisms and DH special issue. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000217/000217.html.
Using the resources below, investigate how digital publishing effects scholars from marginalized communities.
Activities:
Below are several digital projects created to showcase the history of people from maginalized communities. As you look through them, think about how these scholars analyze the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. How does the use of technology enhance these projects?
- Colored Conventions Project
- The Colored Conventions Project is a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life. Mirroring the collective nature of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions, CCP uses innovative, inclusive models and partnerships to locate, transcribe, and archive the documentary record related to this nearly forgotten history and to curate digital exhibits that highlight its stories, events and themes.
- Mapping the Gay Guides
- Mapping the Gay Guides aims to understand often ignored queer geographies using the Damron Address Books, an early but longstanding travel guide aimed at gay men since the early 1960s. Similar in function to the green books used by African Americans during the Jim Crow era to help identify businesses that catered to black clients in the South, the Damron Guides aided a generation of queer people to identity sites of community, pleasure, and politics. By associating geographical coordinates with each location mentioned within the Damron Guides, MGG provides an interface for visualizing the growth of queer spaces between 1965 and 1980.
Discussion Questions:
- Why do you think digital publishing might give more options for scholars with marginalized identities to share their work as opposed to publishing in a more traditional medium, like a journal article?
- Beyond giving scholars more opportunities for publishing, how else can the digital humanities discipline amplify marginalized voices?
Reflect:
Which reading interested you the most? What topics related to digital publishing and diversity, equity, and inclusion do you want to further explore?
Additional Resources:
UBC-V Public Humanities Hub. (2020, November 4). Using DH tools to examine neglected indigenous texts: Edward ahenakew’s old keyam by deanna reder [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Tk4_x1YcU&list=PLD4qpgyh1kvL9jqLBJAlIgzfO3ikearSZ&index=4&ab_channel=UBC-VPublicHumanitiesHub.
Live from William & Mary. (2017, October 26). Race, memory, and the digital humanities conference w&m 2017. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlTSk1QPx-U&ab_channel=LivefromWilliam%26Mary.
Reflection
Now that you have completed the various readings, activities, and discussion questions throughout this resource, reflect on the work you have done. On a word document, write a short reflection (approx. 300 words) summarizing key ideas about digital publishing and positing any remaining questions you might have. Think about what digital projects you would like to work on in the future.