Stanford University Press Blog

Tracking Changes in Digital Publishing

Copy editors of digital scholarship must take into account the medium of the project.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Photo by Rodger Evans. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

A digital publishing program like ours, which prides itself on being platform agnostic, offers exciting potential for variety in the look and feel of final publication formats but also ensures that some of the production processes typical within a press can never be completely standardized.

As I mentioned last week and will write more about in the future, we have a responsibility to host the projects we publish, and while that hosting environment might be centralized, the process of migrating a project there from its development environment is very much determined by its underlying structure. There isn’t a set of steps we can apply to all the projects in the production pipeline because each project requires a different approach.

The process of copyediting a project must take into account the format and structure of the project.

Likewise, the process of copyediting a project must take into account the format and structure of the project. SUP, like any other established press, has a pretty streamlined process for this stage of production when it comes to books. Page counts normally indicate a ballpark timeframe for how long copyediting will take, and most professional copy editors are already familiar with the file types they’ll be working with. They are presumed to know how to leverage the affordances of basic software like Microsoft Word to manage and track their work. In other words, in most cases, a trained copy editor with a knowledge or specialization in the subject area knows exactly how to handle a manuscript and get the job done.

Is He a Sociopath?

Why the principal question we ask about Bernie Madoff is wrong.

by COLLEEN EREN

Bernard Madoff, painted portrait by Thierry Ehrmann. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In May, HBO’s The Wizard of Lies brought in the largest premiere audience that the network has seen in four years. The film, an adaptation of Diana Henriques’ journalistic account of Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, saw, 2.4 million viewers, the weekend of its release—a sizable audience, especially considering that actors Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner headlined Madoff, a four-hour ABC miniseries on the same subject, only a year prior. Perhaps as a way to seize upon the renewed interest generated by the film, which cast Robert De Niro in the lead role as Bernie and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff, the New York Post ran a lengthy article, “The sad new life of exiled Ruth Madoff,” with paparazzi-style photos of Ruth, her preferred bagel shop, dry cleaners, local clothing shop, and other quotidian details about a no-longer-privileged existence. The UK’s Daily Mail published a similar story with photos of the “recluse” Ruth emerging from a local CVS. With a distinct note of schadenfreude, the piece indicated just how far down the social ladder she had fallen. With the ten-year anniversary of Bernie’s arrest approaching, public appetite for this story and curiosity about its principal characters remains robust.

Whether or not Madoff fits the criteria of a sociopath (or a psychopath) has produced numerous conjectures.

Being a Good Host

Producing and reliably delivering digital scholarship requires a robust hosting platform.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Server room. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The delivery of a book, from author to press and then press to reader, despite its complexity, is pretty well established. Stanford University Press, for example, has been doing it for 125 years. University presses outside the United States have been doing it for as long as 430 years or better. Much can be streamlined in book production when you have over a century to perfect your processes.

Digital publications, on the other hand, are still in their infancy. And the kinds of digital projects SUP is publishing, which move beyond the basic text-centric ebook, are even newer. Although scholars have been creating these kinds of projects for years, only now has any press taken on the challenge and responsibility of advocating this kind of scholarship by publishing it. And part of that process is implementing a plan for delivering the final product to readers.

As many authors of interactive scholarly works know, a project needs a secure and well-maintained hosting environment. For most authors, this environment is one managed by their university, whether by a department or college technology initiative, or a library’s or university’s IT department. These operations are usually fairly well staffed (though rampant nationwide budget cuts to higher education may imperil these assets). But university presses don’t usually have the resources or the need for such dedicated, highly staffed departments. Just as modern presses outsource the physical making and moving (printing, binding, shipping, etc.) of their books, our digital publishing initiative has required that we choose an appropriate hosting provider to manage our growing library of diverse digital publications.

As many authors of interactive scholarly works know, a project needs a secure and well-maintained hosting environment.

Experimenting with Slave Cures

How was new knowledge tested in the Atlantic World?

by LONDA SCHIEBINGER

This beautiful plant featured in the “Negro Dr’s” cure for yaws.

An extraordinary experiment pitted purported slave cures against European treatments in Grenada, a small island south of Barbados, in 1773. Plantation owner A. J. Alexander experimented with his “Negro D^r’s” medical techniques in an effort to cure yaws, a horrid tropical disease infecting the skin, bone, and joints bred of poverty and poor sanitation. When Alexander tested his slave’s cure, what was he actually testing? African cures transported to the Americas? Remedies developed by Amerindians and transmitted to African slaves, who, unlike Europeans, were familiar with what we today call tropical medicine? Cures developed by plantation slaves in the Americas? Or, by some great twist of irony, cures communicated by Europeans to the slaves via the plantation complex?

Alexander considered his slave’s cure for yaws to be part of a body of medical knowledge derived from Africa, referring to the slave’s cures as “Negro Materia Medica.” And, indeed, historians writing about “slave medicine” often assume an African origin of a cure. Did Africans bring medicines and medical techniques with them from their homelands or did they experiment with new plants and cures found in the West Indies? More generally, how did knowledge circulate in the Atlantic World?

Right to Repair is Right to Interpret

As text technologies evolve, so too does the province of literary analysis.

by DENNIS TENEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

How is a tractor like a writing desk?

Some metaphorical insight is to be gained in the comparison between reading and writing, and reaping and sowing. Changes in technology that facilitate physical contact between laborers and their element, be it a blank page or a fallow field, bring farmers and literary scholars into a more direct, non-figurative conversation, concerning the nature of electronic goods.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics. Modern tractors like modern typewriters are also computers, which means that these tools now contain an inward facing surface, marked by inscription. Solid-state memory arrays are machined out of silicon, ceramic, palladium, platinum, silver and other precious metals. They are tiny storehouses for information—programming instructions—which ultimately govern the behavior of the mechanism. The presence of such a surface and the capability to respond to its commands is what differentiates "smart" devices from their lackwit counterparts. The smart device, to paraphrase Marx, is one that evolves, out of its silicon brain, grotesque ideas. It is a thing imbued with potential for symbolic manipulation.

It should not surprise us then that protections usually reserved for intellectual property have been expanded to cover such tangible goods as harvesters and combines. In her essay "Freedom to Tinker," Pamela Samuelson, of Berkeley Law, described the now infamous attempt by John Deere, a major international maker of agricultural machinery, to restrict access to the innards of its machines, thus severely limiting its customers' ability to repair their own equipment. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and repair.org have mobilized politically, resulting in "right to repair" bills adopted into law in at least eleven states, including New York and Massachusetts.

Preserving Born-Digital Scholarship

Keeping up with innovation is an added challenge for authors in the digital medium.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Public domain via Max Pixel.

One of my first projects as digital production associate for the works being published under SUP’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative was to create a set of technical guidelines. It has proven to be a complex undertaking and one that is unearthing many philosophical questions and considerations. Over three months of work on these documents, which will be featured here in the coming weeks, has shown that just as a recommendation seems to be complete, something in the technological world changes, and the guidelines need to be updated. It’s the nature of the digital, and it’s something many of us know all too well.

Many authors that compose their work in and for digital environments feel the sting of loss when what they’ve created succumbs to the ruthless speed of technological innovation.

The life of a technophile seems to constantly oscillate between elation and grief. The excitement at the birth of a the latest mind-blowing API, elegant publishing platform, lifesaving open source plug-in, or game-changing JavaScript library is inevitably closely followed by the death of another favorite app, well-used software program, or familiar media interface. While the swing keeps us curious and creative, it can also become exhausting and frustrating.

The Form of Digital Projects

Unlike print, the form of digital projects has a direct bearing on the ideas they convey.

by NICOLE COLEMAN

A word processor from the 1970s-1980s. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Not too long ago we used word processors to write documents on computers. The act of writing itself was called “word processing.” The excitement around the revolutionary new technology (first electric typewriters, then computer applications) inspired a new name for writing, defined by the instrument with which we produced it. Now the technology has become common place and we just write documents, whether electronic or on paper. The term “word processing” has fallen out of use. 

So, in another decade, will the long-form, peer-reviewed digital humanities projects, or interactive scholarly works, produced today be known as just books? Is it our excitement about the new technological instruments of production that has us searching for a new name? Time will tell. What we know for certain is that this new form of scholarly publication has significant implications for the practices and processes of authoring, publishing, archiving and preservation.

In another decade, will the long-form, peer-reviewed digital humanities projects, or interactive scholarly works, produced today be known as just books?

Global Media in the Holy Land

From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.

by MAHA NASSAR

Control room of Arabic-language satellite TV channel. Photo by Deirdre Kline, 2008. Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

Flip through some of the eight hundred or so Arabic satellite television stations available today, and you’ll find many programs that would look quite familiar to American audiences. On the popular MBC 1 station, you can watch Good Morning Arabs and Arab Idol, both of which are produced and hosted in Arabic, but have formats nearly identical to those of their American counterparts. Programming on MBC 4 would look even more familiar, with popular American shows like Project Runway and CBS’s The Talk broadcast in English with Arabic subtitles. The programs’ sidestepping of political sensitivities and frequent product placement exemplify the commercialized, corporatized global media that has come to the Arab world in recent decades.

But there is another type of global media, one with a longer and more interesting history. Long before satellite television and the internet became the primary modes of communication and entertainment in the region, written texts, especially books, newspapers, and journals, were being hand-copied, printed, sold, mailed, and smuggled across geographic and political divides. Far from being commercialized entertainment, this written media was utilized by political organizers and intellectuals to subvert official state narratives, challenge government policies, and connect otherwise isolated peoples to one another.

Beyond the ebook

As scholarship and technology evolve, the question of how to define born-digital work arises.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

Part of any publisher’s production workflow is registering published items with identifiers of various kinds. For traditional books these identifiers includes things like ISBNs and other cataloging descriptors like OCLC numbers and Library of Congress call numbers. With the advent of digitized texts came the addition of Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs. Assigning all these identifiers involves metadata, which inevitably means defining the publication’s format type. Definition is easy when a format has been widely understood, accepted, produced, and circulated for centuries. The process of cataloging and registering books is pretty streamlined for most publishers. Even assigning identifying information to ebooks, a much newer format, has become pretty routine. But digital projects like the ones we’re publishing, which are inherently multimodal and web-based, offer an entirely new and somewhat perplexing set of challenges.

A recent discussion I had with a DOI registering agency was a reminder that the organizations and entities that publishers work with on a regular basis don’t yet understand that what we at SUP are publishing, and what other publishers will inevitably be adding to their programs, is very different from what’s already out there. So it’s worth taking a moment to establish what distinguishes our digital publications from other kinds of digital publications, like ebooks, that seemingly have none of these challenges of definition surrounding them.

Digital projects like the ones we’re publishing, which are inherently multimodal and web-based, offer an entirely new and somewhat perplexing set of challenges.