Stanford University Press Blog

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Zombies in the Archives

Preserving web-based content, including scholarship, presents a host of unique challenges.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

The Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive.

It’s been widely noted that the typical website lasts roughly three to five years. One of the goals of SUP’s Mellon grant is to mitigate that inevitability by exploring a range of preservation approaches for the web-based works we’re publishing. While documentation is a necessary component of archiving digital content, an ideal archive would also offer readers the ability to fully experience the interactive qualities of a digital scholarly work. So I’ve spent the past week learning about what some people are doing to make digital content accessible, even after its three-to-five year countdown has expired.

Just as last week’s blog post on documentation was going live, I was checking in at the 2017 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, a meeting with a heavy focus on web archiving. If documentation offers a way to chronicle the experience of interacting with digital content that is no longer accessible, web archiving seeks to capture a snapshot of a website, even if it’s not quite as interactive as the original. Take, for example, the Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive that crawls websites and records them so that readers can ostensibly visit a version of a webpage as it appeared on a specific date in history. It’s an important resource, especially at a time when information can disappear overnight, as if it never existed.

 

A Wayback Machine capture of whitehouse.gov on October 31, 2016 and the live site as of June 25, 2017.

Sustainable Design for the Digital Age

Our Digital Production Associate on documenting and preserving born-digital scholarship.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Jasmine Mulliken (right), at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

I spent last week at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute on the UVic campus in Victoria, British Columbia. It was one of many DHSIs that are held all over the world each summer. In addition to giving a presentation on SUP’s Archivability Guidelines, one of several guidelines we’ve created to guide our authors toward responsible and sustainable digital development, I had the opportunity to participate in one of twenty-five weeklong intensive seminars offered by some of the leading digital humanists in their fields. Since one of my roles on the Mellon project at SUP is to explore methods of archiving and preserving the born-digital content we’re publishing, I eagerly signed up for Professor Dene Grigar’s course, Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation.

Dene has been a longtime fixture in e-literature circles, and her Pathfinders project serves as an excellent model of the traversal method for documenting digital work that is no longer accessible without specific hardware. Building onto that model, students in her class teamed up to document their own chosen projects, which ranged from a code poem that interactively translates algebra into poetry, to an interactive essay from a larger e-lit fiction, to a music-based app, to a digital kinetic erasure poetry project.

But perhaps one of the most intensive documentations was the one my group worked on together. Over the course of two days, we put together a rich documentation of SUP’s first publication under the Mellon initiative, Enchanting the Desert.

Meet the Team

Meet the people blazing the trail in publishing born-digital scholarship in its native form.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

Over the two years since we first announced our Mellon-funded initiative to develop a publishing program for born-digital scholarly projects, we have learned and achieved quite a bit. And while we might have been a bit quiet on the blog about our progress during that time, we’ve been busy developing our program and we’re now eager to begin sharing our experiences. As we continue to meet the challenges of pioneering a unique and unrivaled approach to digital publishing, we’ve recognized that what we’re learning can not only benefit other future publishers of digital projects but also those projects’ authors, reviewers, editors, and audiences.

The increasing number of academic authors undertaking the challenges and opportunities of employing digital modes in their scholarship demands that more publishers take on the challenges of adding digital formats, beyond simple epubs, to their existing programs. We hope by highlighting our own experiences in such an exciting endeavor that we can serve as a model for others in the field of scholarly communications and initiate conversations that will advance publishing standards in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. If, as Abby Smith Rumsey has suggested, humanity’s position in technological development makes us “like adolescents in the throes of life’s most awkward age,” we hope that by making transparent our own awkward moments and developmental epiphanies, for better or worse, we can ease the growing pains and establish a support network for publishers and authors creating and publishing digital-only scholarship.

We hope that by making transparent our own awkward moments and developmental epiphanies, for better or worse, we can ease the growing pains and establish a support network for publishers and authors.

The Digital Pilot

The author of our first DH publication speaks to the merits of born-digital scholarship.

by NICHOLAS BAUCH

Nicholas Bauch's born-digital monograph, Enchanting the Desert, combines written research, photography, and spatial mapping to explore the Grand Canyon, and will be SUP's first digital humanities publication. 

Stanford University Press’s digital publishing initiative will revolutionize how humanities scholars work in web-based media. I make this bold and hopeful statement as the pilot author in the initiative, and therefore from the perspective of a practicing digital humanist. The term digital publishing conjures a variety of possibilities, the most familiar being blogs, electronic books, wikis, or online newspapers and journals. For the past two decades libraries and presses all over—including SUP—have undergone massive restructuring to accommodate these new media. When I reference SUP’s digital publishing initiative as revolutionary, therefore, I am not talking about any of these familiar formats. Scholars engaged in what has become known as the Digital Humanities (DH)—encompassing disciplines as wide-ranging as Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and Geography—have developed a track record of serious engagement with digital media to both formulate new disciplinary questions and to express new theses in compelling ways.

Taking Digital Scholarship to the Presses

Director Alan Harvey speaks to the Press’s new digital publishing initiative.

by ALAN HARVEY

"The Future of Books." Image by Kyle Bean. CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 via kylebean.co.uk.

About a year ago I, along with Editor-in-Chief, Kate Wahl, and Stanford University Librarian, Mike Keller, began a series of round-table meetings with key Stanford faculty to discuss their impressions of scholarly publishing and to field recommendations for the Press’s future development. The theme of born-digital research quickly surged to the center of these discussions, and it soon became clear that some scholars were heading in directions that were beyond the scope of traditional academic publishing models.

What became evident from our conversations was that an entirely new digital publishing product was needed.

What became evident from our conversations was that an entirely new digital publishing product was needed; one that elevated digital-born projects to the same level of academic credibility as the traditional monograph. In this void, both publishers and academics were missing out on crucial opportunities for collaboration.

These conversations spun into a year-long dialog with faculty, authors and advisors—a dialog that has culminated in a new mandate for us at SUP: to create a system for the formal publication of peer-reviewed digital humanities and social science projects. This brave, new digital initiative, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Scholarly Communications Program, will work in cooperation with Stanford Libraries, and Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond, whose Digital Scholarship Lab will be a vital collaborator.

Thinking Along Digital Lines

Announcing a new publishing program for the digital humanities and social sciences.

The digital humanities uses new digital tools to explore age-old humanist questions.

The nascent fields of digital humanities and computational social sciences have ballooned in recent years. Emergent technologies (and scholars’ increasing fluency with these technologies) are providing academics with new ways to visualize, analyze, and package data. The Mellon Foundation—an active champion of these budding approaches—has seeded programs and initiatives at a number of universities with grants geared toward exploring new platforms, and encouraging specialists to think along digital lines while researching, writing, and conceptualizing how best to present their arguments and findings.

Through this endeavor, SUP hopes to facilitate the work of digital humanists and computational social scientists.

Owing in no small part to the Mellon’s support, the digital humanities and computational social sciences are a growth industry in academia, yet for many academics the prospect of pursuing digital projects may present a significant opportunity cost. Whereas journal and monograph publishing both have established ecosystems of peer review and accreditation—making them key benchmarks in the careers of scholars—there are no formal channels for “publication” or consistent “peer review” standards analogous to article and monograph publishing for digital projects.

At SUP, we want to change that.