E-Publishing in the Humanities:
Opportunities and Challenges
Charles Watkinson
Director of Publications
American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Pratt-SILS Summer School @ UCL
June 21, 2007
What are the “Humanities”?
“The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the
study of the following: language, both modern and
classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence;
philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics;
the history, criticism and theory of the arts.”
Our Cultural Commonwealth
The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities
and the Social Sciences
(2006). John Unsworth, chair. Available from:
http:// www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure
Who are the players?
• University Presses e.g., OUP, Virginia
• Commercial Publishers & Aggregators e.g.,
Blackwell, Proquest, Alexander Street Press
• Societies and Institutions e.g., MLA, AAA
• Libraries e.g., UMich, CDL, HighWire
• Collaborations of Scholars e.g., Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Technology Firms e.g, Google, Microsoft
Academic Live Search, Open Content
Alliance (Yahoo)
. . . and combinations of the above
Types of digital scholarship
• Collection building
– Digital surrogates from scanning
– Born digital content
– Published and unpublished, text & multimedia
• Tool building
– Analysis tools
– Authoring tools
– Collaboration and community e.g., tagging
. . . Phased approach. Projects that survive contain
a combination of the above.
JSTOR: Collection building +
• 1996: Founding goals: to preserve scholarly
journals in electronic form and provide access
to them as widely as possible (250 million
significant accesses in 2005).
• 2007: To add tools and value to the resulting
aggregation of 24 million pages of content; to
integrate new kinds of published and
unpublished material; to support and archive
(Portico) born digital and multimedia.
JSTOR: 2007 Innovations
• New tools: “My JSTOR” personalization
and tagging; faceted searching;
indexing by Google; reference linking
and DOIs.
• New types of content: Books as well as
journals; 19th century British pamphlets
(20,000 from 28 JSTOR member
libraries); search across ArtStor.
Rotunda: Tool Building
• University of Virginia Press digital
imprint.
• Searching tools designed for edited
collections of letters (founding fathers
and mothers; 19th century writers).
• Analysis tools for “fluid texts.”
Oh, the possibilities . . .
• Accessible from anywhere at any time
to anyone with an internet connection.
• Revealing new and unexpected links
and allowing multiple interpretations of
the primary data.
• Mashing up text, images, databases
into a richer scholarly broth.
. . . but, woe, the challenges
• Technical: the ephemeral nature of digital
data and problems of archiving; the necessity
of standards for interoperability.
• Legal: copyright, the ‘culture of permissions’
• Economic: financial sustainability of business
models, lack of cyberinfrastructure.
• Social: non-collaborative culture of
scholarship; lack of tenure recognition for
digital scholarship (MLA statement).
Case Study: The ASCSA
Founded in 1881. Four main aims:
• Teaching grad sts on Athens campus.
• Supporting research on Greek studies.
Blegen (80K) & Gennadius (120K) Libraries, Wiener
Laboratory, Archives, Admin
•
Archaeological exploration.
Corinth (1896) & the Athenian Agora (1931)
•
Publication. Hesperia & monographs
Now: Silo-ed, opportunistic
• Experimental online presence.
• Outsourcing. Where’s my content?
• Questioning of the publishing function;
path of least resistance leads to
balkanization.
 disjointed experience for users.
(Atypon vs. JSTOR even different passwords)
Future: Collaborative, integrated
• Everything online to industry standards.
• In-house repository delivered via web.
• Clear levels of editorial intervention;
linking published version to
supplementary materials.
 seamless experience for users.
How to get there? Mellon plan
$291,000 grant in 2006. $1.2 m. from EU.
• Build an institutional repository capable of
archiving and presenting all types of media,
including archaeological databases, and
interoperating with others.
• Reengineer institution so excavations work
together to common standards while libraries
and publishing share resources. Redeploy
staff to focus on digital information creation
and management.
problem
method
• Search for visual comparanda from other
sites and museums (image collections,
illustrations in publications).
• Examine the context it came from (site maps
and plans, field notebooks, databases of
related finds). Is it from a domestic context?
• Do a literature search, drilling back through
references (publications, citation linking).
• Do physical tests, comparing against
previous results (scientific databases). Is
there burning?
solution
Thank you
Charles Watkinson
Director of Publications
American School of Classical Studies at Athens,
Princeton, NJ
Tel: 1 609 683 0800 x 21
E-mail: cwatkinson@ascsa.org