Watch video of the session here.
A combined session of a panel and a paper:
Reimagining Scholarly Publishing and the Public Philosophy JournalMark Fisher, Bill Hart-Davidson, Ethan Watrall and Dean Rehberger This panel will explain the development of the publishing platform for the Public Philosophy Journal. The Public Philosophy Journal platform leverages the open and collaborative capacities endemic to digital communications to cultivate a community of scholars engaged in curating, amplifying, and reviewing existing work, while also modeling a collaborative editing and developmental writing process designed to produce rigorous new work related to public philosophy broadly construed. The process of publication for the journal involves five basic dimensions: 1. Curate and Amplify: Current digital public philosophy discussions and pertinent web content will be curated through the use of existing web-crawling technology that brings them to the attention of members of a world-wide community of scholars, graduate students, and policy makers, whose evaluations will serve to filter out the less promising contributions to the discourse and to determine which contributions will be amplified even further; 2. Review: The journal includes mechanisms for open peer review of curated and submitted content, including a system for reviewing and credentialing reviewers and incentives for careful reading and for consistent and thoughtful commenting; 3. Enrich and Develop: Digital public philosophy is greatly enriched by creating a space of collaborative developmental writing that will start with the most promising content identified in the review process and lead to the publication of rigorous scholarly articles; 4. Publish: Reviewed articles are openly published together with invited responses to the reviewed work; 5. Cultivate: Ongoing open dialogue about the published articles will be cultivated by invited and curated responses that have the potential to feed the development of new collaborative scholarship. None of the many philosophy journals world-wide that currently involve aspects of an open access model incorporates all of these articulated dimensions and none leverages open access in a way that so intrinsically links the content and the manner of its production to the mission of the journal. The practice of public philosophy is well situated to enable members of the academy to engage members of the public in open, digital spaces, to the benefit of both academic philosophy and public discourse.
The session will have a series of lighting talks that focus on 1) Public Philosophy Journal overview; 2) Virtual community building; 3) Creating a collegiality index; 4) user experience and application design; 5) placement of app development in larger constellation of scholarly publishing
To Download or Not to Download? An Examination of Academic Publishing and Knowledge Dissemination in an Internet Era Jaime Kirtz Digital Humanities is a growing field in North American academies, from the creation of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities to the annual Global Digital Humanities Conference. But many scholars still use traditional approaches from their home departments to analyze new digital text, reinforcing older models of scholarships and thus I propose a quantitative and qualitative examination of traditional scholarly publications and their Internet disseminated counterparts in a variety of formats while using a digital forensics methodology. The main objective of my essay is to interrogate how the digital paratext - the hyperlinks, cover pages and external information of a published text (Genette 9) - demands a revision of conceptual paradigms indigenous to the humanities, particularly authorship, circulation and dissemination of knowledge and how those inform educational practices in a twenty first century era.
The changing nature of humanities scholarship is implicitly connected to changes within publishing and communication technologies through elements of preservation and collaboration (Golumbia 57). The essay focuses on digital publishing of specific academic texts such as the "Norton Anthology of English Literature" and the MIT Press series, as Kindle files but also including concurrent scanned downloadable PDFs, YouTube clips, and closed forums’ reprinting of the same scholarly text. This will be accomplished using a digital forensics framework, which includes interrogating document encryption, website authority and moderation, writing and reading interfaces and website design, establishing new boundaries for how culture is accessed in the twenty first century education system and how objects, through digital modification, translate data about access within education. Further, the commentary surrounding these texts, such as Amazon comment sections and closed forums will be examined and statistically analyzed, as secondary interaction is a form of digital paratextuality that encourages anonymity while shifting perspectives on credibility. The modification of digital writing is pertinent to academic culture as advances in new media and the theory surrounding it establish the institution’s role in the global sphere.
This essay also concentrates on paratextual features of digitalized scholarly journals, such as graphs, marginalia, footnotes, citations, titles, publishing marks and indices. The discursive role of paratextuality in the humanities illustrates how the rise of a topological critical mode implies changes to digital textuality as well as power relations within the fields of humanities research, illustrating what type of research has agency and what is permitted to be published. These two sites of inquiry, academic texts and journals, share similarities but also produce different sets of connections to academic economies, knowledge production and dissemination, and intellectual property. Ultimately, I hope to understand how academic digital objects assert their position within humanities traditions and how their material identity relates to the rules that govern this position, illustrating larger shifts within the university structure itself. Further, this essay aims to incite a dialogue about the role of Digital Humanities within the academic publishing industry and how such a presence can be used to alter learning access.
