Presentation Marseille: Experiments with digital publishing in the HSS:
possibilities and challenges
Slide 1 a and b: title fragment
I will talk for about an hour after which I want to open the floor for questions,
reflections and discussion.
A few disclaimers beforehand
1. I will go over some of the main trends in digital publishing in HSS. I will give
mainly examples of experimental publishing projects, some you might be
familiar with already (some more familiar than I am). These examples will form
the trigger for the discussion afterwards.
2. I will focus mainly on books because of importance of the format for the HSS
and my particular expertise. Likewise, I will focus mainly on academics and
publishers.
3. I will zoom in on experiments currently conducted with new formats and new
publishing models. Why? They give a glimpse into the future, where things are
headed, they express the potentials and challenges of digital publishing and the
issues people are confronted with while engaging with the new medium.
Experiments are needed; to keep on moving and to critique established practice!
4. Finally we will have a discussion on where digital publishing is headed, what
needs to be explored, what are the challenges, the problems, which issues are
at stake, what kind of communication and publishing system do we want and
how will we work on achieving that? What are the technical, cultural and
economic factors inhibiting us form devising a truly digital-based system? Will it
even be (practically and theoretically) possible to devise a system more akin to
the digital? What will be the possibilities and challenges of such a system? And
finally, which standards inherited from the print world are we not willing to let
go off, and why?
Slide 2: main fragment: what will we be looking at.
The influence of digitization on how scholarly publications are produced,
distributed and consumed.
When we talk about academic publishing, one important aspect to consider
when we look at the scholarly communication value chain, is that the
‘publishing function’ increasingly can be performed by actors who are not
traditional publishers. For instance scholars are becoming publishers, as they
publish their work on their personal websites or blogs, libraries are becoming
publishers, when they for instance use the content in their repositories to create
overlay journals. Of course we also see the rise of new players in the field, from
Google, with its Google Book Search to Amazon and even Wikipedia could be
considered a publisher.
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So, due to the digital developments, the function that has traditionally
been performed by the publisher can now increasingly and ever more easily be
performed by different players in the value chain. This has lead to the
development that you can see shifts taking place in the different functions and
roles being played combined with disintermediations of different roles and
functions in the value chain. Does this mean that now everyone can be a
publisher or not?
Traditional publishers do have a big ‘historical’ advantage when it comes
to expertise, brand name, human capital and experience. This advantage has lead
to a situation in which although specific roles and players in the scholarly
communication system can now be disintermediated, the traditional core
players in the system, the academics (both as authors and readers), the
publisher, the library and the university still have a strong position in the
system. We can however see a development towards more collaboration and
communication between these players in the value chain, benefiting from each
others experiences and expertise. New strategic alliances are being made and
shaped between players both as a means to expand ones horizon and as a way of
protecting ones own position.
However, as some of the experiments which I will show today will show,
increasingly production, distribution and consumption are merging, happen in
real-time in a development from product to process. But more on that soon.
Slide 3: trends
Let’s look at some general trends in digital publishing:
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New Business Models
Development from product to process (blogs, wikis etc.)
Collaborative research (collaboratives, social media, remix): from
individual to collective experience: community around books (Richard
Nash) conversation around books, interactivity
New ways of assessment (Open peer review, peer-to-peer review, user
comments, Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
(digital) Platforms and cooperations of small publishers
Social media (twitter, facebook, blogs)
Slide 4: New business models
Scholars in the Humanities still fit to what one would call their ‘traditional field
profile’. They mostly work alone, they prefer to write books and they also prefer
to cite books. As a recent survey amongst European Humanities scholars I
conducted for the OAPEN project (about which more soon) together with my
colleague Paul Rutten shows, Humanities scholars main reason to publish is to
communicate with their peers. Furthermore, they see publishing as a means to
claim their research findings and as a way to enhance their careers. Spreading
knowledge to the rest of society is also seen as a plus point. Financial reasons are
at the bottom of this list.
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However, as our research shows, one could claim that in today’s thoroughly
digitized society, communication to ones peers is not as efficient as it may just
be. Scholars profess a need for digital monographs to search for relevant
information: they, as well as their libraries, feel ebooks are lacking in
availability (in libraries and online). The daily practices of scholars are changing
– they are increasingly using digital tools for their research and most
importantly they expect information to be available at their fingertips: digitally.
At the same time there is still a need for the printed book for thorough study.
And as our survey results have shown, this need is felt amongst all age classes,
also amongst younger scholars.
But it is not only ebooks that are lacking in availability. The amount of copies of a
given printed book in libraries has also been dwindling. This gives one to
wonder about the efficiency of the print based communication system: where in
the 70’s print runs of on average 2000 where quite common, now a days figure of
around 300 copies are more likely. Could we still call this an efficient system of
dissemination of scholarly research?
Libraries are increasingly buying less monographs mainly because of the rising
costs of journals in STM accompanied by budget cuts. In their acquisition
decisions libraries choose to prefer buying the more costly STM articles, which
forced publishers to produce lower print runs to avoid overproduction. These
lower print runs not only meant less dissemination of the research results for
HSS scholars, it also meant their reputation and career got affected. As it got
harder to get material published that was hard to sell, this meant younger
scholars trying to get their thesis published, publications in languages other than
English and minority fields where hit hardest along with smaller publishers and
libraries trying to serve their clients in the most efficient way.
Ebooks do not solve this problem: dissemination is still restricted to the few
libraries that actually buy the ebook, and ebooks are still mainly bought together
with printed books, making it foremost not a cheaper solution.
However, dissatisfied with the high prices of journals and the spread of
knowledge, a revolution in scholarly communication was taking place first and
foremost in STM: A new movement born out of dissatisfied scholars and
librarians called out for public access to research results for the benefit of
science and society as a whole. It took some time for the Humanities to see the
benefits of Open Access for books, as I will show further on in my presentation,
probably mainly to do with the slow development and uptake of the ebook in this
field.
Getting back to Open Access, there are basically two strands of Open Access: the
Green Road, in which publications are archived in repositories after or before
publication, making them freely available, and the Gold Road, which focuses on
making publications openly available from the moment they are published. Many
people in academia and publishing feel the last road might be more suitable for
books in the Humanities, as the Green Road does not fundamentally change the
underlying system of publishing and thus the decision on which books get
published. They should thus be seen as complementary strategies.
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OAPEN, Open Access Publishing in European Networks, in a collaborative effort
of European publishers and universities, has done research on and is at the
moment trying out a common OA publication and funding model for peer
reviewed academic books in the HSS. Furthermore OAPEN will create a large
freely available collection of current books in European languages in various
fields of HSS. The project started September 8, 2008 and has just recently
finished, amongst others with the creation of an OA library of books from dozens
of different participating academic publishers.
Experiments with Open Access book publishing are (becoming) ubiquitous.
I conducted some 30 case studies of publishers, scholars, libraries, academies,
learned societies and other parties, in various combinations, involved in the
Open Access publishing of books. From this research we can conduct that almost
all of the models are based on the so-called hybrid model, where the Open
Access edition is available for free online and a printed copy can be bought, as
many feel the Open Access online edition could promote sales of the printed
edition, or at least will not harm the sales. Furthermore all experiments are
depending on some form of funding, be it institutional support, experimental
grants or infrastructural support. Furthermore, most models are also busy
developing services on top of the free content, targeted at libraries, publishers,
scholars or other parties, to provide some additional revenue.
Open Humanities Press. Open Humanities Press (OHP) is another example of a
press experimenting with Open Access book publishing. Founded in 2006 by
‘Open Access journal editors, librarians and technologists’ (Jöttkandt 4), OHP is
an international Open Access publishing collective in critical and cultural
theory. In contrast to OAPEN, the focus of OHP lies less on creating a new
publishing model and more on removing negative perceptions that still exist
concerning Open Access and online publishing. OHP is not only academic-led
but also (and perhaps more so than other, more traditional presses) academicfocused. Its philosophy is one of advocacy and of making clear to researchers
and other stakeholders what the benefits of Open Access are. Most of all, OHP
wants to battle the negative perceptions that pertain to online publishing.
Establishing notions of trust and quality in electronic and Open Access
publishing are essential to persuading the scholar to step over the threshold into
the digital realm. OHP wants to make it easier for those scholars who are not that
involved or interested in the online world to make this transition. OHP wants to
counter this perception problem by establishing a strong brand around its
online and openly available products that is first and foremost trustworthy. All of
its publications are peer reviewed and academically certified by OHP’s renowned
independent board of international scholars.
There are many more examples of presses experimenting with OA books and
the numbers are rising. This is just a small sample. There is also the OAD wiki
and my report on OA books available on the OAPEN website.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Publishers_of_OA_books
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Slide 5: From product to process:
Ok to quickly go back to the other trends, which I will explore a bit less
thorough.
From product to process:
Increasingly the isolated stages of writing, publishing and consuming are
becoming more integrated. Researchers publish research in process on blogs
and even dedicated worksites were working papers or drafts are up for
comments. (Examples Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolesence and Ted
Striphas’ Difference and repetition wiki, Gary Hall’s Open Notebook).
Publishing thus is increasingly taking place in different moments of the research
process. The same goes for the consumption of the material, readers become
more involved as commenters. Also, after a work is finished, the possibility to
add, change or update material, is made easier by the digital product. This shows
a general trend away from a stabilized endproduct of research to a more fluid
and amendable concept of research as becoming.
In this process the official publication increasingly becomes a delineation line, a
threshold, an authoritative form with a certain filter function. Once this
threshold is passed the process does not end but the product evolves, though
enhancements, updates, commentaries, versionings and adaptations. Of course
different things can be filters in this process. There can be a community filter
moment, a academic or a professional peer filter, a publishers branding,
and/or commercial filter.
With books becoming never-ending, in my opinion they better reflect the
concept of research, which is also never-ending.
Collaborations:
Increasingly, also in the Humanities, collaborations amongst researchers are
taking place, both in the research and the publication phase. For instance
amongst departmental colleagues, amongst universities, amongst different
disciplines. Many (software) platforms are currently in use or being developed to
aid this process, just think of the use of Googledocs for research. Another
example of a collaboratories research environment or virtual research
environment such as this project set up at Leiden University by a group of
history scholars called Tales of the Dutch revolt. In the Netherlands there is a
lot of interest at the moment for collaboratories as is witnessed from this clip
by SURF, the organization for innovation in ICT in higher education in the NL.
and The Virtual Knowledge Studio.
New ways of assessment:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly and Postmedievalism have also been
experimenting with open or peer-to-peer review, either mixing forms of peer
review or going for solely open. Things are early days with these methods
though, and there have been comments on the value of the comments and on the
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fact that the system of authority is only replicated in open peer review, no
initiatives for people outside academia to react etc.
Blogs and comments are also an important way of assessment for researchers.
The question is however, when will Digital work become part of curricula?
Platforms:
(collaborative) electronic Platforms for book distribution, for libraries. Look at
the success of Amazon, and Google Books, openeditions, Oapen, multiproduct
platforms, software platforms such as Zotero and Mendeley
All to increase scale, to act as filters, all products in one place, ease and
convenience for end-users and producers.
Platforms provide basic infrastructure
Social Media
Want talk about this very long but people in both academia and publishing exist
that belief social media are unimportant for the production, distribution and
consumption of research. Think again. Joining the conversation that goes on
here, the community building is essential. Not to say we can’t be critical of the
institutions behind the social media we use the most (choices can be made here
such as for open source alternatives), nevertheless they are important and
authors, publishers, readers and libraries can all be found here.
Slide 7: Challenges
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Institutions, power structures and conservative practices
the biggest problems facing digital humanities are institutional, not
technological
Quality
What is quality? How do we establish quality? This is an important thing
to figure out.
Filtering
Financing
Control
Technology
Conservative practices
However, this traditional field profile is still strongly embedded. There is a
strong cultural attachment to print in the humanities (print holds more status)
and a scholar is still required, also in the digital age, to write and publish a
substantial book-sized work, in print, to further his career. Authorship,
individual responsibility and attribution of a text are still considered very
important. Not only is this institutionally embedded and part of the reputation
economy of scholarly research in the humanities, the production of a scholarly
monograph is also still praised as a necessity to properly communicate one’s
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thoughts in these fields. The monographic format gives the possibilities to
develop multiple complex arguments and narratives. Furthermore, its print
nature gives it stability and integrity. Not only the creation of a print-based
monograph is preferred, where it comes to the thorough study of monographs,
scholars still prefer to consult a printed edition.
However, again, things are starting to change. Before many researchers
considered electronic-only publications as the equivalent of publishing
something without peer review. Our research has shown that electronic and
openly available publications are not necessarily seen as being of less quality
than printed publications. Show slide However, in many circles in the humanities
views do still pertain, that the Internet is not a good place to find authoritative
material because of the high level of poor quality information online.
The cultural attachment to print and the book as format can perhaps partly
explain the eventual slow uptake of digital communication and publication
practices in the humanities. But the situation is and has been rapidly changing.
As Chris mentioned yesterday, publishers are not very willing to experiment
and although the availability of ebooks in libraries is increasing, it is still not
sufficient to answer to the researchers growing need. Commercial interests
and power structures of established publishers rule, governance and
hegemonic: lack of funding money and investment in experiments from those in
power: keep status quo, replicate existing systems into the digital.
In conclusion, it seems that scholars in the humanities are standing on a
threshold, on the one hand eager to enter into the digital realm, on the other
hand held back by their cultural and institutional practices, by their norms,
values and proven ways of doing things when it comes to conducting,
communicating and publishing their research. These practices (mixed with a
good amount of skepticism and fear concerning online publishing) are inhibiting
them from truly taking advantage of the possibilities the digital offers.
Quality:
What is quality? How do we establish quality? This is an important thing
to figure out. Quality can be seen as a floating signifier to use Laclau and
Mouffe’s terminology, it is an empty vessel, we don’t know what it means.
Why is double blind peer review the best, does that guarantee quality?
What do we mean with quality, how do we measure it and does quality
mean something different in the digital age. And we must make sure not
to mix up quality and excellence. How can we ensure quality and are
there other digital ways to assess quality. We need more discussion on
this in the Humanities, and more transparency on quality and peer
review procedures currently in use by publishers.
Filtering.
Very important: data and information overload. How do we find our way in the
masses of information everyday? We need reliable and personalized filters (and
we use them already) to filter out the good from the rubbish. At the same time
we need to be very weary of filter failure: missing things because of our over-
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personalized settings, no more surprise finds. We also need to be cautious of
automatic filters. If I type in bike in Google I get other results than u do, who
controls our filters, what is behind the algorithms? Wo do we trust to filter?
Control
Smoothly going over to control here: as Chris mentioned yesterday: we need to
keep on arguing for a free public space online where things can be said. We
need to be weary of the websites we use and who controls them. Who owns
our data? This is what we can see as the dark side of openness. Distributing
things in the open also
In this case Open Access runs the risk to be overtaken by a neoliberal rhetoric
that seems to be increasingly apparent within academia, one focusing on
transparency and accountability and on the measurement and evaluation of
research and research results as part of an audit culture (Hall Media Gifts). For
Open Access to be beneficial for scholars and society at large, the focus should
remain on the values most cherished by the scholarly community: accessibility
and quality. Although the search for a sustainable business model is of the
utmost importance, the adaptation of Open Access as simply another choice
model by commercial publishers (offering it as an option only if the author asks
for it) or as a way to further advance profits by charging above proportional
author fees, is not the way forward. Openness is admirable but we should be
aware of the negative side effects. At the same time we should be wary of arguing
for the Open Access exchange of research results within a world in which the
delivery platforms (especially mobile platforms) are increasingly closed off
as part of their business models. Open Access will only flourish within an open
web, without proprietary standards and extensive DRM regimes.
Open Access should be promoted to governments and institutions as a system
that can create more value for society (Houghton) and as a model that needs
extra investment to experiment with new models, to make sure that the cost of
providing Open Access will not reduce the availability of funding for humanities
research and will not come out of already decreasing research budgets. All in all
Open Access offers possibilities for change within the system but while we are
promoting it, we should be wary of wrong uses and adaptations.
Technology
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Technology
Technology: standardization, early days, connections between
institutions, interoperability, infrastructure, archiving, machinereadable metadata: not going to go in to that here.
Slide 8: experiments
Networked books and hypertexts
One of the most famous examples of a networked book is McKenziewark’s
Gamertheory, set up with the aid of the institute for the future of the book, which
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is currently at its third version and has an elaborate network of user comments.
somewhere between the sprawling public discourse arena of the blogosphere
and the collaborative knowledge factory of Wikipedia
Enhanced publications
When it comes to the use of digital publications in an online environment, the
possible ways to access and read a publication are of course increased in the
digital environment. So is the possibility to add supplementary information.
Especially in a field like Archaeology where large datasets are created during an
excavation, which also have a specific need to be preserved, as the object of
study, the soil, is destroyed during an excavation, making it into unique data
material. The preservation of this material is thus extra important. The
possibility to now add these datasets to a publication is of course as mentioned
before, increasingly being explored at the moment. This is also what the project I
am using here as an example, on enhanced publications for the Journal of
Archaeology in the Low Countries, is focusing on. SLIDE 15 An enhanced
publication is hereby defined as a publication that is enhanced with three
categories of information:
(1) research data (evidence of the research)
(2) extra materials (to illustrate or clarify), (data visualization tools dynamic
GIS maps) or
(3) post-publication data (commentaries, ranking)
Moving on to another category of experiments, namely with wiki, liquid or fluid
books. Liquid books are essentially books that can be adapted, modified and
remixed, in most cases via a logic of ‘open, decentralized and distributed
editing’. Some of them use wiki software some don’t. To give a simple example of
this idea, let’s look at this clip on dynamic books, an adaptation of liquid books
(or more modular books in this case) for textbooks.
Liquid publications project
Another example of this model is the liquid publications project.
Another example of a practical experiment that focuses on the benefits of fluidity
for scholarly communication is the Liquid Publications (or LiquidPub) project.
This project, as described by Casati, Giunchiglia, and Marchese (Casati,
Giunchiglia, and Marchese), tries to bring into practice the idea of modularity
described before. Focusing mainly on textbooks, the aim of the project is to
enable teachers to create and compose a customized and evolving book out of
modular pre-composed content. This book will then be a ‘multi-author’
collection of materials on a given topic that can include different types of
documents.
The Liquid Publications project tries to cope with the issues of authority and
authorship in a liquid environment by making a distinction between versions
and editions. Editions are solidifications of the Liquid Book, with stable and
constant content, which can be referred to, preserved, and which can be made
commercially available. Furthermore they create different roles for authors,
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from editors to collaborators, accompanied by an elaborate rights structure for
authors, with the possibility to give away certain rights to their modular pieces
whilst holding on to others. In this respect the liquid publications project is a
very pragmatic project, catering to the needs and demands of authors (mainly
for the recognition of their moral rights) while at the same time trying to benefit
from and create efficiencies and modularity within a fluid environment. In this
way they offer authors the choice of different ways to distribute content, from
totally open to partially open to completely closed books.
Culture Machine Liquid books series
A more radical take to liquid books is provided by the OHP Culture Machine
Liquid Books series of experimental digital ‘books’ published under the
conditions of both open editing and free content. They use wikisoftware
(PBworks) and at the moment have four volumes in process.
Two other examples of liquid books (the first more liquid than the other) I
mention here because they are two examples of two other trends in the digital
humanities: its increasing connection to the sciences on the one hand, and its
collaborations with the arts (mainly due to the possibility of doing creative
things with multimedia in the digital realm) on the other side.
Living books about life
The first example is that of living books about life:
“The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable series of co-edited, electronic
open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and
biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.
These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, i.e., they are open to ongoing
collaborative processes of editing, updating and commenting upon, by readers of
all levels.”
Remixthebook
Finally, Mark Amerika’s newest book called remixthebook is accompanied by a
website of artistic and theoretic remixes of material from the book, video,
sound etc. From the website:
The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many
of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists,
creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is
central to their research interests.
remixthebook author Mark Amerika, along with co-curator and artist Rick Silva,
has invited over 25 contributing international artists, poets, and critical
theorists, all of them interdisciplinary in their own practice-based research, to
sample from remixthebook and manipulate the selected source material through
their own artistic and theoretical filters.
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Culturomics
Finally, a final trend within the humanities: the book as data, or the influence of
culturomics on humanities research. Books as data, data mining, googlebooks
(Dan Cohen, Lev Manovich), 'big data' humanities
Two hundred years of history in the form of 5,195,769 digitised books can now
be probed for cultural trends using Google's new culturomics tool, the ngram
viewer. An example of this is Victorian books, a project by Dan Cohen from the
center for history and new media
The vast digital library of Google Books presents for the first time the possibility
that we can conduct a comprehensive survey of Victorian writing—not just the
well-known Mills and Carlyles, but tens of thousands of lesser-known or even
forgotten authors—to see if the Victorians truly did use the kinds of words and
phrases that Houghton thought were indicative of their character.
Our effort to understand Victorian books through a series of graphs about
publication titles. Words in Titles, 1789-1914
Lev Manovich has become very famous with his cultural analytics research.
Cultural analytics is the exploration and research of massive cultural data
sets of visual material - both digitized visual artifacts and contemporary visual
and interactive media. To take on the challenge of how to best explore large
collections of rich cultural content, Cultural analytics has developed new
methods and intuitive visual techniques to address both the new and existing
research questions, which currently drive the humanities.
The idea of quantitative analysis and visualization of massive cultural visual
datasets in the humanities context.
An example can be found here with some time magazine covers.
Being able to better represent the complexity, diversity, variability, and
uniqueness of cultural processes and artifacts.
Slide 9: literary publishing and the social
Finally, I want to draw your attention to some developments in literary
publishing, cause I think that in literary publishing people have a much better
idea of the communities surrounding books and the book as a social artifact than
they do in scholarly publishing. Developments here are important to keep in
mind for academic book publishing.
I am not much of a definition person but I like the idea put forward by Tim
carmody (@tcarmody in twitter) that the book is a gathering (both a gathering
of content and a gathering of people). One of the projects that looks at that in an
interesting way is the openbookmarks and what they are doing for the
development of social reading by creating software to share bookmarks.
Ereading allows people to make bookmarks, write notes in the margins, select
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extracts, and measure their progress through the book. This is the reading
experience, and for the first time it's possible to save and share this experience
directly. A project by James Bridle, he wants to make sure these bookmarks are
open though and belong to the reader.
Open: Bookmarks must be shareable, saveable and persistent.
Another project in social reading is the if:book community surrounding Doris
Lessings the Golden Notebook. It’s an experiment in close-reading in which
seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins
Crowd-funding
Another development that might be interesting in social publishing to keep an
eye on is crowd-sourced funding, using the community to monetary bak or
pledge for a publication. I don’t think it is the winning solution, at all, but I do
think that with less funding available and the need for publications to be online,
experiments with these kinds of models are a must.
Slide 10: Questions
Questions that will lead the discussion are whether the experiments conducted
are a real challenge or alternative, or whether they are a continuation (in digital
form) of the print-based knowledge system. What are the technical, cultural and
economic factors inhibiting us form devising a truly digital-based system? Will it
even be (practically and theoretically) possible to devise a system more akin to
the digital? What will be the possibilities and challenges of such a system? And
finally, which standards inherited from the print world are we not willing to let
go off, and why?
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