Notes from the session on building a public humanities website.  Thanks to Suzanne Churchill!

Here are shared collaborative notes for the Publishing Makerspace session.

Notes for the Omeka bootcamp sessions led by Sharon Leon are courtesy of Sylvia Miller.

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.

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?