The issue I’d like to discuss is how to streamline the creation of a web presence for our scholarly publications. Since for tenure purposes we still have to publish print books, some scholars are thinking about ways to extend their books to the web (e.g. environmental historians Richard White and Karl Jacoby). This is often a costly and time-consuming endeavor, but can yield great rewards as a way to share data, explore areas that didn’t fit in the book, or even engage stakeholders in the research.
At what stage in a project should we create a site? What tools are available–or could be built–to facilitate companion sites? How can print and digital forms compliment each other and increase exposure of and interest in humanities scholarship?
Links to check out:
Richard White has posted visualizations relating to his new book, Railroaded, through Stanford’s Spatial History Lab. Note that some of these visualizations include links to download the complete data sets he used.
Karl Jacoby’s companion website for Shadows at Dawn includes a large number of primary source materials cited in the book as well as links to media coverage and lesson plans.
2 comments
Brian Croxall
May 31, 2011 at 4:50 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Just this morning I was in a meeting with the leader of our campus’s Author Development Office, talking about the way in which marketing of academic titles is shifting increasingly onto the authors. In brief, here are my thoughts:
Academics like to think that their work speaks for itself. They don’t want to sully themselves (or take the time) to engage in promoting their own work. In the past, this was possible. Publishing was endorsement enough for what one had written. These days, when publishing is available to all as a commodity (at least insofar as publishing on the web is concerned), the real endorsement is attention. In order to garner more attention, one needs to be engaged with extensions of the scholarship, and this often means websites or outgrowths of the publication. However these take a lot of time to maintain and even longer to build an audience if one is not already engaged in social media. My recommendation then is that faculty get involved with social media as early as possible, as it can (should?) help move their scholarship during the writing process and so they can start to develop an audience. One might make a bigger effort for a book publication.
Over the summer, we’re going to be talking with as many academic presses as possible to get a feeling from them about where they see these trends moving.
Jack Dougherty
June 2, 2011 at 11:58 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Thanks for proposing this session, Cassie, as I have grappled with similar questions. For my pre-tenure book, my limited energy and digital skills went into creating a companion site to accompany the published text. But now I’m drawn to creating born-digital web-books for scholarly and general readers, and collaborating with others to coordinate and develop the user-friendly tools needed to create them: see Collaborative Writing Tools for WordPress.