One or two minute rundown of survey results (wherein we’ll decide who’s on the right side of history (with respect to the duck-sized horse versus horse-sized duck question (and perhaps others))).

–wpk

Publishing Makerspace is a publishing environment that is reconfigured as a place where all the components of a scholarly project — books and e-books, virtual and physical exhibits, visualizations, live performance and film — can be integrated using a collaborative process. This place enables the creation of a multimodal publishing environment that fully integrates digital content with manuscripts and ‘traditional’ scholarly content.   The goal is to create a multimodal publishing environment that fully integrates digital content with manuscripts and ‘traditional’ scholarly content.

It is important to note that Publishing Makerspace is not solely a digital project or approach. We are interested in crossing the analog-digital divide to recognize the ongoing interaction and interplay between the analog and the digital. The result, we hope, will be a more efficient, interoperable process of knowledge creation and production and an enhanced, more meaningful experience for multiple audiences.

Members of the Publishing Makerspace team will share a bare bones outline of the process and lead a discussion about the value of this model and its potential for expanding traditional publishing models to integrate DH work.  

How can we communicate our scholarly work to a broader public?  In 2012 I co-founded a public humanities website — with the support of the Wake Forest Humanities Institute — that aims to do just that.  What are the payoffs and the pitfalls of this kind of public, digital project?  In this “Talk” session I will outline the history of The 18th-Century Common, “a public humanities website for enthusiasts of 18th-century studies.”  I’ll describe how the project dovetails with — and sometimes diverges from — institutional goals and priorities.  I’ll discuss challenges in generating public-oriented scholarly contributions.  In particular, I’ll focus on our recent addition of the WordPress tool “Press Forward,” which we hope will facilitate additional contributions from scholars to the site.  This THATCamp session will generate conversation beyond The 18th-Century Common to the topics of public engagement with scholarly work, institutional support for public humanities, and the use of Press Forward.

As an archivist, I approach the digital humanities specifically with an eye towards how to position my work and outputs so that they can be used by researchers, scholars, students, and other interested communities. But there’s a lot to unravel in those considerations. Some questions to bat around in this session include

• Technical aspects: What sorts of files or information would be useful for archival repositories to provide? How can we make our (digital or analog) materials more discoverable and accessible to all? What technical skills should we cultivate to be useful to our humanities colleagues? How can we document the digital works of scholars that are being created?
• Historical realities: How do we all work around the silences of archival records? What can we do about all the materials that remain minimally available or completely unavailable due to limited archival labor?
• Systemic issues: How do technologies like Wikipedia (which adheres to notability guidelines and lacks diversity but also less restrictive than many institutions, allows widespread access to information, and benefits from edit-a-thons) expand or restrict access to scholarship? What institutional policies do we have that restrict additions to collections, access, use, and even future research? How can we, individually and institutionally, work together to define “notable” and collect “important” materials while not overly burdening collecting institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums (LAM)?

Confused about copyright, either generally or specifically with your project? Do you have concerns about fair use or author rights? Do you think you comprehend the basics (or, better yet, the nuances), but aren’t 100%? Join a conversation about copyright, bringing your questions, experiences, triumphs, and frustrations to the table, without judgement or fear (psst, I’m not the copyright police!).

Talk proposal: I would like to, well, talk (see what I did there?) about publishing the results of this very THATCamp. Then again, I always want to talk about  publishing, so there’s that. Still, methinks we should thinking about properly rendering the manifestations of our THATCamp discussions into some sort of consumable/distributable yet permanent monograph (and maybe not as just a minigraph (kids today, with their hippety-hop music and FaceSpace pages)). So, yes, I’d like to discuss the very distinct possibility of creating a literally handy piece of ad hoc technology — the kind which really needs no batteries, or power cords, or software updates — in a format with a very intuitive user interface, and very few bugs (apart from the real kind perhaps), and which will last a very, very, very long time (especially once librarians get their hands on it). I’m talking about books, people. Are you picking up what I’m puttin’ down?

Link to session notes: docs.google.com/document/d/1kxulS1sSEaXIaIqeGt5Ei1w3qj62vFPkdh7ZgRXpJTI/edit?usp=sharing

I’d like to hear from you about institutional support models for Digital Scholarship, particularly—but not exclusively—in the Humanities. Questions would include: Is there a unit at your institution that supports digital scholarship? Where is it based: library, digital scholarship center, …? How is it funded? Are you working with such a unit on a project/Are you part of such a unit? What has been your experience?