Digital Publishing Workshop

Following the Long Civil Rights Movement Conference in April, the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” project team had the opportunity to discuss digital publishing with the conference panelists in a workshop.  Several members of the staff of the UNC Special Collections Library were also in the audience.  We deeply appreciate the participation of all those who attended—especially considering that a beautiful spring day and ongoing conversations about the conference panels beckoned!  Following are highlights of the workshop discussion.  I welcome comments, questions, and continued conversation.  This will be the first of a number of posts about the “publishing” part of the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” project.

The workshop began with a number of “what ifs” suggested by LCRM team member Mark Simpson-Vos, who is an acquisitions editor at the University of North Carolina Press and a project team member, relating to “publishing as community”:  What if works of scholarship were published online with a commenting feature allowing authors and others to link to primary sources and enrich the work on an ongoing basis?  What if an online journal published articles when they were ready instead of by issue date, included multimedia, and allowed flexibility in article length?  What if works in progress and conference presentations were made available online in a space that allowed for collaborative work?  What if research notes and primary sources were published online in connection with the books and articles they informed? 

The Collaborative Publishing Platform (CPP) Prototype

Next, I presented a prototype that the project team has developed to illustrate some of these possibilities.  It features a chapter of a forthcoming book on the North Carolina Fund by Bob Korstad and Jim Leloudis which is slated to be published by UNC Press in the spring of 2010.  The prototype presents the chapter online and allows the authors and others to comment on the text at the paragraph level.   To show what might be useful in teaching and research, the authors and the project team had written comments that pointed out research opportunities and provided links to archival photographs, oral history interviews, and documents.  Each comment appears in a pop-up window and allows responses and continued conversations.  For now, this prototype is prosaically called the Collaborative Publishing Platform (CPP).   (Suggestions for a more exciting name are welcome!)

Before general discussion began, the authors commented briefly on the prototype.  Bob Korstad suggested that publishing in this platform might be a useful response to two disappointments he had experienced after publishing his last book:  (1) Interesting research was left on the floor that he could point out to others, and (2) scholarly debate that he had to cut out to make the book more accessible could be included in a different way; he could point out to scholars where the narrative makes scholarly contributions. He also saw the CPP as a way to turn the book into a memory project for people eager to reconnect and as a means in general for his scholarship “to live and work in this world.”  (For more on memory projects, see the LCRM Conference session “Race, Memory, and Reconciliation.”)

Jim Leloudis expressed interest in creating a laboratory culture in the humanities as a way for a group of colleagues or students to collaborate.  Within that humanities laboratory, he was interested in inspiring new research by pointing out research opportunities that he had noticed and valuable archival material that he had uncovered at UNC and elsewhere.

The Discussion:  Praise, Warnings, and Ideas

A lively discussion ensued in which the audience offered some praise, a number of warnings about challenges, and several potentially useful ideas.  The praise was for the concept of the multilayered book connected to primary sources, which a few participants found the most valuable aspect of the experiment represented by the prototype.

One warning concerned academic legitimacy of online scholarship; participants agreed that tenure-review committees are slow to change and that peer review must be built into online publications.  Another warning was about the challenges involved in control of “gray” literature (working papers) and moderation of comments.  Zones and levels of access were suggested.  

A fourth challenge was business model.  “What’s in it for the Press?”  one of the audience members asked bluntly.  I mentioned Open Access content as a potential way to drive sales of books and sales of subscriptions to online products and services.  Kate Torrey, Director of UNC Press, took a step back from that to recognize that the question is a critical one.  The current publishing model is in many ways broken, she explained, and this Mellon project allows space to experiment with new technologies and new ways to move into the digital world.  How to create something sustainable is a huge challenge, she said.

Ideas from audience members included the following:

• For studies of visual works, artists, and culture, such online publication would be a benefit because authors could expand upon what a publisher could afford to include in print. 
• The CPP would be a great place to re-publish or link to articles lost in anthologies.
• It would be very useful to be able to conduct a full-text search in a multi-publisher database of books.
• A wiki-type space for an online bibliography on civil rights might be useful, especially if it were annotated.
• Offering simultaneous publication of a print edition of a book and a digital edition in the CPP could help to market the book and make publishing with UNC Press especially attractive.  The more online discussion and uploading of interesting papers that took place in connection with the book, the more that activity would increase interest in the book.
• It would be great to see more collections of papers from conferences like this one published online promptly, because it takes too long to publish them in print.
• It would be really different and useful if students could look at the boxes with links to archives around the country and imagine further research.
• Scholars need a book café space for critical book reviews and give-and-take about books because newspapers are shutting down their book reviews.
• Archivists would find it helpful to receive scholars’ papers (correspondence, research notes, etc.) in the context of publication of their books instead of all together after they die.  These collections often come to archives in a disorganized state without obvious markers connecting items to the scholars’ important projects. 

The project team plans to continue to develop the CPP and experiment with it for different purposes.  Feedback and comments from scholars, librarians, publishing professionals, students, and anyone else are welcome.