Stanford University Press Blog

The Patriotism of the Poor

Americans who have the least nevertheless tend to love their country the most.

by FRANCESCO DUINA

CC0 via Pixabay.

America’s poor have plenty of reasons not to love their country. By most measures, they face bleak prospects and their government offers them the least support of any other advanced country on earth. Their chances of upward mobility are slim, the gap between their earnings and those of richer Americans continues to grow, and they work exceedingly long hours for very little. They have access to very limited social services and support.

It would be very reasonable for Americans to not love their country—to be resentful, rise up, and demand changes to the social contract of the country. Instead, America’s poor embrace and idealize their country.

Their patriotism runs deep and exceeds in many cases that of the poor in other advanced countries and that of richer Americans. It not only entails a love of country but a belief in its superiority and greatness. America, they feel, is a better nation than most.

The patriotism of poor Americans runs deep and exceeds in many cases that of the poor in other advanced countries and that of richer Americans.

This is a deeply felt and resilient sort of appreciation: while the patriotism of many richer Americans has waned since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, for instance, that of poorer Americans has remained steady and, by some measures, even increased.

Embracing Daughters in China

Breaking with centuries of precedent, village families are embracing a singleton daughter.

by LIHONG SHI

Photo by Trey Ratcliff. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.  

In late 2015, China announced the end of its controversial one-child policy, a law that was on the books for thirty-five years, during which time most Chinese families were limited to having only a single child. One of the most consequential aspects of this decades-old policy was the preference it created among Chinese households for sons—a bias with both socioeconomic and cultural underpinnings and drastic demographic consequences. Today in China, men outnumber women by over thirty million—but this stunning statistic obscures a significant and rarely acknowledged shift in Chinese society.

In the mid-1980s, China relaxed its one-child limit to allow rural couples in most regions to have a second child, if their first child was a girl. The policy was designed to give families another chance to have a son. And yet surprisingly, in recent years, many couples have voluntarily forgone this opportunity and have willingly accepted a singleton daughter. Was the preference for sons over daughters waning? And if so, why? Between 2002 and 2012, I conducted long-term ethnographic research in a rural community in Northeast China to understand this emerging reproductive pattern.

In the mid-1980s, China relaxed its one-child limit to allow couples to have a second child if their first child was a girl. And yet surprisingly many couples have voluntarily forgone this opportunity.

Where Are You From?

How place determines race for racially in-between immigrants.

by NEDA MAGHBOULEH

Immigrants to the United States waiting for medical examination, circa 1912. Public domain via Wikipedia.

July 4, 2002, was a particularly humid Independence Day in Boston. It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I had stayed on campus to work, and for the first time my family had come to visit me in New England. That year, we found ourselves among the thousands of revelers who descended in undulating waves down to the banks of the Charles River to see the fireworks. My mom and little sister scrambled onto the first available patch of grass while I unrolled a blanket I had snatched off my twin-size dorm room bed hours earlier. My aunt unpacked almonds, cantaloupe, and soda from a plastic shopping bag; my dad, ambling slowly, as he does, brought up the rear.

As we fanned ourselves on the blanket, my parents discussed how twenty years earlier to the day they had boarded a Fourth of July flight to Portland, Oregon, with me, at nine months old, in tow. We were striking out on our own, away from New York City, where I was born and where, as new immigrants from Iran, my parents worked in a Persian rug store owned by my dad’s extended family.

For a long time, where an immigrant was “from” defined his or her ability to become an American.

That morning in Boston I was the last to notice the white woman on the next blanket over who was staring at us in disgust. She stared at my dad in particular, who in a bit of confusion politely smiled back at her between his bites of cantaloupe. She whispered something in her companion’s ear; they rolled up their blanket and left, flip-flop sandals smacking up and down against the ground. We didn’t see or think about the women for a few minutes until two men in sunglasses and cargo shorts began to walk in wide circles around our blanket. “Oh my God,” my mom whispered to me in Persian. “The cops are watching us.” The July humidity was already intense, but it began to feel suffocating. Within seconds, a uniformed police officer and his K-9 approached us.

125 Years of Publishing

And the pioneer printer and university president who started it all.

 

Stanford University Press—or at least the idea of it—was born in March 1891 in Bloomington, Indiana. It was there that Leland and Jane Stanford offered the presidency of their new university to David Starr Jordan, then the president of Indiana University. Between the time the offer was made and the Stanfords’ departure the next day, Jordan drew up a memo of understanding for the Stanfords’ approval­—“I should like your assent to the following propositions,” Jordan wrote, of which there were four. The fourth and final proposition read: “That provision be made for the publication of the results of any important research on the part of professors or advanced students. Such papers may be issued from time to time as ‘Memoirs of the Leland Stanford Junior University.’” The Stanfords accepted his terms, and the university, with Jordan at the helm, opened in October 1891. The campus’s first publishing ventures were not long in following: In September 1892, it launched the Leland Stanford Junior University Monographs series, and with its first publication, Stanford University Press was born.

The Tarriff Controversy in the United States, 1780–1833 by Orrin Leslie Elliott was the first-ever monograph published by the university.

Or at least, part of it. For that exact same year, Julius Andrew Quelle, a member of Stanford’s inaugural “pioneer class,” established a printing facility on campus—what would come to be known colloquially as “the Stanford University Press.” And though university publications were occasionally shopped out to printers in nearby San Jose or San Francisco, it was Quelle who, out of his cramped quarters in the university power plant, printed the first two books to bear the SUP imprint as it appears today. And it was by President Jordan’s request that the imprint appear on all of the books produced for the university in Quelle’s small shop—a shop that in only a few decades would become the property of the university and an award-winning publishing house.

Thus it was in these parallel strands—President Jordan’s commitment to publish works from the academic community and Quelle’s entrepreneurial endeavors as the campus pressman—that the origins of Stanford University Press are to be found. And this year marks 125 years since both the establishment of Quelle’s print shop and the debut of the university’s first-ever publication. How these two pioneers—Stanford’s first president and one of its first students—laid the groundwork for the publishing tradition at Stanford reveals a great deal about the charter and character of the university in its earliest days, not to mention the mandate that continues to animate the work bearing the SUP imprint.

This year marks 125 years since both the establishment of Quelle’s print shop and the debut of the university’s first-ever publication.

Deals from the Back-to-School Sale

This month take 30% off all of our books, including these quick reads, classics, and magnum opuses.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Now through October 1st, all (yes, all) of our books are 30% off for our Back-to-School Sale. Hundreds of titles spanning dozens of disciplines are on offer: you can browse books by discipline, check out our recent award winners and bestsellers, peruse our list of 8 new and noteworthy titles, or take some cues from our deal highlights below. Here we’re showcasing cheap quick reads, must-grab deals on magnum opuses, and a few discounted disciplinary classics.

 

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Stanford Briefs »

A short-form imprint of Stanford University Press

Our Stanford Briefs, weighing in at around 100 pages each, bring considered viewpoints to bear on ongoing debates in short and incisive form. These scholarly hot takes weigh in on a variety of timely issues. For instance, in How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, Andrew J. Hoffman explores how social influences and identity politics trump climate science and engender political inertia; more importantly, he offers his suggestions for how to bridge these divides. In How Civility Works, Keith J. Bybee explores the viability of civil discourse in American public life, amidst media platforms saturated with bluster and vitriol and teeming with trolls and hostility. Leo R. Chavez, meanwhile, unpacks the politics around US race relations and undocumented immigrants and their children in his Brief, Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship (now available for preorder). The best part? During our Back-to-School sale, Briefs are just $9.09 plus shipping.

 

OTHER BRIEFS YOU MAY LIKE: Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt by Joel Beinin, The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, or We Are All Migrants: Political Action and the Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-hood by Gregory Feldman.

The Economic Puzzle of Japan

Socio-political factors may explain Japan's perplexing stagnation in the global economy.

by KENT E. CALDER

Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Francisco Diez. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

For a century and more Japan was regarded globally as a pacesetter for economic growth. Then, in the 1990s, its economic bubble suddenly collapsed. The country’s growth engine has never really re-started, despite two decades of macro-economic stimulus, a variety of reformist governments, and most recently Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “three arrows” stimulus program. Japan’s protracted stagnation has global implications, both economic and strategic. Most importantly, within the past decade, China has replaced Japan as the largest economy in Asia, and the second largest in the world. Japan’s ability as a US ally to balance China is eroding as a result, and its capacities as a provider of development assistance and global financial stabilizer are waning as well.

For a century and more Japan was regarded globally as a pacesetter for economic growth. Then, in the 1990s, its economic bubble suddenly collapsed.

Japan’s checkered economic course raises at least three puzzles of broader global and theoretical relevance. First, observers continue to debate what precipitated the country’s stunted growth of recent decades; Japan grew rapidly for generations, from the 1880s through the 1980s, and then abruptly stagnated. Second, questions remain around why the country’s response to globalization has produced mixed or less-than-ideal outcomes. It enthusiastically supported global institutions like the United Nations and became one of the world’s largest capital and goods exporters but failed to respond rapidly to sweeping international changes in communications, transport, and educational exchange. And third—to compound the paradox—there were significant cross-sectoral variations in Japan’s globalization response. While some industries excelled in globalized markets, others have struggled—why is this?

“What Are you Wearing?”

On aural sex and the mysterious disappearance of audio porn.

by DOMINIC PETTMAN

Public domain via pxhere.

You are feeling frisky.

You are home alone.

What do you do?

If your blood is pulsing with testosterone, the chances are that you will reach for the laptop and browse around. You will likely click until you find pixels arranged in such a way that an attractive face and body is convincingly simulated on the screen. This digital body is no doubt in a state of nakedness (or near undress) beckoning you with a come-hither expression. It may also be in the midst of being ravished by another two-dimensional body, playing the role of your proxy. Your eyes drink this image in, as you project yourself into the scene. If your system is more infused with estrogen, however, you are more likely to rely on imagination and memory; projecting erotic visions on the insides of your eyelids (even as there is an increasing chance you might succumb to the Internet’s infamous capacity to provide “porn on tap”).

We all have different libidinal triggers: olive skin, long eyelashes, bangs, freckles, cleavage, ribbons, stiletto heels, stockings, tattoos, abs, beards, and so on, ad infinitum. But the point is that most of these are visual. Given the modern privileging of sight (“seeing is believing”), we tend to neglect, or even forget altogether, that the ear can be one of our most sensitive erogenous zones. Indeed, psychoanalysts tell us that the ear is often the primary source of the libido, given that we are likely to hear things as children that excite and stimulate us. Even if we have no idea what these sounds are, they comprise the sonic gateways through which we enter the erotic realm of egoistic fantasy. As grown-ups, we may find particular voices to be “sexy.” And we certainly tend to find the noises produced by lovers to be a crucial element of arousal, during the torrid bedroom tango. But intriguingly, such sounds have slipped further and further away from our collective consciousness in the twenty-first century, as the Internet has absorbed and replaced previous media forms. Why is this?

Given the erotic power and potential of sound, why are there so few places online that cater to the ear?

Top Picks from the Back-to-School Sale

This month, take 30% off all of our books, including these 8 popular and timely reads.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Now through October 1st, all (yes, all) of our books are 30% off for our Back-to-School Sale. Hundreds of titles spanning dozens of disciplines are on offer: browse books by discipline, or check out our recent award winners and bestsellers, or, for those looking for a few quick recommendations, check out our list of 8 new and noteworthy titles below.

 

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A Practical Education »
Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees

by RANDALL STROSS

RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
humanists, headhunters, and anxious parents of college-aged progeny

That liberal arts degrees are a poor choice for today’s job market is a seemingly unimpeachable truism—yet Randall Stross is on a mission to impeach it. Following the career paths of a few contrarian humanities majors, Stross points to their success as proof positive that a liberal arts education is vocational; that in an era where industries evolve at breakneck speed, the versatility and critical thinking skills of a humanist education are rare and valuable assets. Weaving these case studies together with a history of one of the nation’s top universities and an account of the longstanding pull-and-tug between humanist disciplines and technical learning, A Practical Education shows that liberal arts majors can excel not in spite of, but because of, their education.

ALSO SEE: A Practical Education was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and is excerpted here.

OTHER BOOKS YOU MAY LIKE: Cultures@SiliconValley by J.A. English-Lueck and The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges by Joseph A. Soares.

The Legal Limbo of DACA

Only Congress can provide relief for undocumented immigrants—it is time for them to act.

by LEO R. CHAVEZ

Protest near Trump Tower after the announcement of the administration's palns to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. September 5, 2017. Photo by Harrie van Veen. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Attorney General Jeff Session’s announcement that the Trump administration is ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program came as no real surprise. This is what Donald Trump promised to do if elected president. But let’s be honest. The DACA program was always a stopgap measure instituted by President Obama because of Congress’s failure to fix our broken immigration system. For years, Congress batted around the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have provided immigrants who came as children a path to citizenship.

The Latino Threat » investigates the stories about recent immigrants to show how prejudices are used to malign an entire population.

When President Obama introduced the idea of DACA, I welcomed the action but noted that it was not a panacea, just another form of legal limbo. As I wrote in my book The Latino Threat: “As a temporary stopgap measure, this new policy does not provide permanent relief from deportation (and those who come forward will be giving the government information on their whereabouts).” I also noted that a new president, one hostile to immigration, could end DACA. This has now happened. Despite assurances that the information collected from DACA applicants will not be shared with ICE for deportation purposes, there is still the risk that such easily available information will be used against DACA recipients. Supposedly confidential data has been used in the past, such as when Japanese Americans were rounded up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The real problem is Congress’s failure of leadership and the destructive partisanship that pervades our nation’s politics. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans are in favor of providing undocumented childhood arrivals a means to legalize their status. This is the only real way these young people can use their education to contribute to society, which benefits not only them but all of us.

Immigration, Families, and Solidarity

In transnational families, grandmothers become caregivers to support their loved ones.

by KRISTIN E. YARRIS

Angela, Laleska, and Laleska’s coresident cousin Alexa pictured above. Photo by Kristin E. Yarris.

In a working class barrio of Managua, Nicaragua’s capital city, lives Angela, a mother to four adult children—two who live with their spouses and families in Managua, and two who have immigrated to the United States. One of Angela’s migrant children, Karla, emigrated in an attempt to rejoin her father, who had left for the United States about a decade prior. Upon Karla’s departure, she left behind her then one-year-old daughter, Laleska, for whom Angela assumed care, thus becoming responsible for her granddaughter’s physical and emotional wellbeing for more than a decade.

The story of Angela’s family is shared by many transnational families. Their experience illustrates the trials of transnational life.

While Angela, who is now in her 50s, finds a sense of purpose in caregiving, it has also been hard work: caring for her granddaughter has proven to be both physically demanding and emotionally trying. For Laleska, separation from her mother over more than a decade was not easy either, though Angela’s carework sustained the tie between Laleska and her mother, a tie made tenuous by absence, distance, and the uncertainty of family reunification, all of which are exacerbated by U.S. immigration policies.

During my time in Nicaragua conducting fieldwork with families like that of Angela and Laleska’s, I also volunteered with Servicio Jesuita para Migrantes (SJM, or Jesuit Migration Service), an NGO spearheading a nationwide campaign to protect and defend the rights of migrants. As part of the campaign, SJM produced a weekly radio program called La Mochila Viajera (The Traveling Backpack), which was designed to raise public awareness about immigration. La Mochila Viajera aired short public service vignettes, designed to raise awareness about the challenges facing Nicaraguan migrants and their families at home and abroad.

I reached out to families, like Angela’s, who were participating in my research study and invited them to share their stories on La Mochila Viajera if they were inclined to do so. Laleska decided this was something she wanted to do, and I escorted her to the radio studio one muggy Monday morning to record her vignette. Laleska was visibly nervous, but also committed to telling her story, as she told me, in order to let other children of migrant parents know they were not alone in the challenges they faced.

 

TRANSLATION: "Hi, I’m Laleska. I am twelve years old. I’ve lived with my grandmother since I was one year old because my mom left, for economic reasons, to the United States. Since then, I only see her in December. But for three years, I haven’t been able to see her. We just communicate by phone. Truthfully, I don’t like talking with her because I feel bad about not having her near."

 

Breaking the Power of Monuments

Is a new form of iconoclasm emerging?

by NATALIE CARNES

The Confederate Monument to Robert E. Lee is removed from its perch in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 17, 2017. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In a popular video circulating amidst the national debate over Confederate monuments, protesters chanting, “No KKK, no fascist USA,” throw a yellow rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina and wrench it from a pedestal. The statue twists and crumples as it hits the ground. The crowd cheers. Some come forward to take pictures with the toppled statue, which lay in its position of vanquish until hauled away the next morning.

The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

The iconoclasm in Durham is both new—it speaks to the particular racial anxieties of our present moment—and also familiar. It echoes the French revolutionaries smashing signs of the old regime in their efforts to establish a political order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It echoes, too, the early Protestants breaking, burning, and mocking the images in the Catholic Church that they had renounced. The images that worried early Protestants most were those depicting the divine, for such images, according to their detractors, falsely pretend to bear God’s presence. The Protestants defaced images of Christ to say—to prove—that God is not present in them. God, they insisted, is present everywhere, unbounded by materiality. These iconoclasts, then, broke images both to deny God’s presence and affirm it. A similar dynamic characterizes the iconoclasm of political revolutions. The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

 

 

Everyday Forms of White Supremacy

When we see white supremacy only in its most explicit incarnations, we lose sight of how racism operates.

by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY

Protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia carrying Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, and a Nazi flag. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity as a sociologist-in-training and now as a Professor of Sociology. My research included a comparative ethnographic examination of a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, which culminated in my book, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Given this background, the events of August 12th unfolded into a spectacle that eerily resonates with the sociological findings of my earlier work, the title of which pays homage to master sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois asks a prescient question: “why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past?” Nearly one hundred years later, I, like many, still struggle to answer this question.

I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity.

Yet, I do offer a tripartite riposte.

While both white nationalists and white antiracists hold deeply opposed political, economic, and social worldviews on a variety of topics, both groups hold aloft a similar ideal of white racial identity. That ideal form of white identity entailed differing performances, depending on the context: a kind of messianic or paternalistic savior to people of color; a creative and cosmopolitan “borrower” of the styles and traditions of people of color in order to alleviate the self-perceived dullness or emptiness of whiteness, and ultimately; a manifestation of biological or cultural superiority by virtue of their whiteness. That ideal white person is both a goal (in the sense of trajectory) and a potent cohesive and organizing force in their lives (in the sense in which Du Bois intended) and thereby provides a double entendre for “bound” in my title. This similarity is built on common assumptions about what “race” is—from its dominant social meanings to assumptions about its biological and cultural make-up. Members of both the nationalist and the antiracist groups I studied also expressed entitlement to all issues coded as “racial” and saw any white exclusion as “reverse racism.” In both groups, it was common to view people of color, as Du Bois put it, with “amused contempt and pity.”

Holocaust Memories On Camera

Survivors’ discussions of Schindler’s List variously affirm and challenge its narrative.

by JEFFREY SHANDLER

Over 53,000 Holocaust survivors have filmed their testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. Photo courtesy of the USC Shoah Foundation (used here with permission).

In 1997 I was attending a conference on responses to the Holocaust, when a man raised a provocative suggestion about video interviews of Holocaust survivors. At the time, the USC Shoah Foundation was in the process of making recordings for its Visual History Archive (VHA), now the largest collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, and other organizations had been making similar videos for over a decade. The man commented that a colleague of his had been watching videos of survivors and claimed he could tell what Holocaust histories or novels they had read and what films or television programs they had seen because these works informed the way the survivors told their stories.

These videos reveal how Holocaust survivors have reflected—in some cases, for decades—on what it means to recall this harrowing chapter of their lives.

This claim resonated with an observation I’d made two years earlier. A student told me that her grandmother was a Schindler Jew—that is, she was on the list of Jews Oskar Schindler had rescued from Nazi persecution during World War II. After the film Schindler’s List premiered in 1993, her family persuaded the grandmother to travel with them to Poland to see where she’d grown up and spent the war years. On the trip they made a video, which my student shared with me. I found it especially intriguing at one point, when the family visited the site of the Płaszów labor camp, where the grandmother had been a prisoner. She recalled worrying about being conscripted to work in Schindler’s factory, because every time her circumstances had changed, it had been for the worse. Then one of her sons asked: “That scene in Schindler’s List, when the Jews presented Schindler with a ring—was it really like that?” The grandmother replied that she didn’t know; she wasn’t there when it happened. Her son seemed disappointed and asked another question about the film; then a different relative asked another one. It soon became clear that, for some family members, the grandmother’s story did not stand on its own but was engaged in relation to Schindler’s List—not altogether surprising, given that the film had motivated the family’s trip to Poland to begin with.

Remembering Refugee Children

Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.

by ORIT BASHKIN

Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as Ma‘abarot. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.

The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.

 

Impossible Exodus » tells the story of Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.

My book, Impossible Exodus, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.

Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children's health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.

Experiments in Digital

Our aim is to establish a program for peer-reviewed, interactive, digital scholarship.

by ALAN HARVEY

Friederike Sundaram, Acquisitions Editor for digital humanities and computational social sciences, navigates Enchanting the Desert by Nicholas Bauch in the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. Enchanting the Desert (published in 2016) was the Press's first-ever born-digital publication.

We are now two and a half years into our four-year experiment in digital publishing. Our goal, to establish a program for the formal, peer-reviewed publication of scholarly works that are truly interactive, with no print counterpart, was an ambitious one, and the learning curve has been incredibly steep. But we’re now at the point where the lessons learned can be discussed in context and shared with the broader community.

We stepped into this experiment with the expectation that the primary difficulties would be technology-driven. Little did we know that much of the infrastructure we take for granted in the print world simply doesn’t exist within the digital. From the mechanics and processes of peer review, through the mundane aspects of copyright registration and library cataloguing, and on to the incredibly thorny issue of preservation, each step has been a challenge. And the challenge has been met across the Press, not simply by the four core team members of our Mellon-funded program.