Yesterday, Mark Sample lead an interesting conversation on Twitter with @kfitz, @eymand, and @JenHoward on the possibility of setting up a “digital-based indie academic press.”
Today, he elaborated:
I was riffing on these ideas yesterday on Twitter, asking, for example, what’s to stop a handful of of scholars from starting their own academic press? It would publish epub books and, when backwards compatibility is required, print-on-demand books. Or what about, I wondered, using Amazon Kindle Singles as a model for academic publishing. Imagine stand-alone journal articles, without the clunky apparatus of the journal surrounding it. If you’re insistent that any new publishing venture be backed by an imprimatur more substantial than my “handful of scholars,” then how about a digital humanities center creating its own publishing unit?
So, I’m thinking…why don’t we do this? I’d like to use the THATCamp spirit (hacking before yacking, collaboration, digital forms of communication) to try to imagine what a digital indie academic press (or UnPress) would look like. Would it feature articles? Online conferences? Hacking sessions? Multimodal presentations? Could we institute peer-to-peer review? When would we publish?
There are lots of productive questions and conversations that could come out of a session like this. But, ideally, I’d like to leave the session with the beginnings of a plan for some kind of indie press associated (in some way) with THATCamp.
9 comments
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Amanda French
May 26, 2011 at 12:24 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Seems like this meshes well with the previous session proposal, as well: chnm2011.thatcamp.org/05/25/humanities-books-online-and-off/
Trevor Owens
May 26, 2011 at 6:22 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
This is a very cool idea. I would also like to put printing physical books on the table too. On demand publishing means that getting physical books is actuary really cheap and easy too. For example, ETC press is really just a cool group of scholars that review each other’s work and publish the PDFs for free and sell copies of the books on Lulu. www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/book
lcc.gatech.edu/~rwhitson3/wordpress
May 26, 2011 at 12:08 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
@Amanda: Actually, you are right. I hadn’t seen that session before.
@Trevor: That’s an awesome idea. ETC press looks really cool. I wonder if we can appropriate but also improve upon their model in some way…
Anastasia Salter
May 27, 2011 at 12:36 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I love this idea, but I’d also like to think about ways we could play with the very form of publishing: I’m thinking about projects like Al Gore’s latest book Our Choice as envisioned by the experimental Push Pop Press: here’s a video of the iPad app.
I think there’s a serious need to move away from the traditional codex and think about ways we can be as experimental with communicating ideas as we are with the ideas themselves.
Jennifer Sano-Franchini
May 29, 2011 at 4:44 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Love this idea. I’m totally for instituting a peer review system. Also could be cool to include certain twitter backchannels (like at a THATCamp) as a fun feature.
Sarah Werner
May 29, 2011 at 9:57 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I think if you want the output from the press to be taken as scholarship that’s going to “count” for hiring and promotion and grants, it’s going to have to be peer reviewed. I do think that with the THATCamp crowd you could probably pull off an open peer review of the sort that Kathleen Fitzpatrick and MediaCommons advocate (as opposed to running into some of the problems I had doing it at Shakespeare Quarterly). I haven’t looked at ETC Press and will need to check that out. But I would want to think carefully about what sort of editorial labor would go into a press, even as an unPress. I’m no big fan of the current state of academic publishing, but I do think that underestimating the value of a good editor is sometimes a problem in these conversations.
Kari Kraus
May 30, 2011 at 9:54 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Great idea–I only wish Kathleen Fitzpatrick could be part of the session too! In terms of thinking about new ways of aggregating, curating, and publishing content, I keep going back to a blog post on “orbital content” that Dan Cohen linked to a while back, which asks us to imagine what it would mean if interesting stuff around the web were easily liberated from a particular location/URL, and instead tied directly to users, who could share it unencumbered with any number of apps or services. Koczon uses the metaphor of “an API of You” to get his idea across, and he has some really interesting ideas about managing the IP and monetary issues entailed by this model.
Brian Croxall
June 1, 2011 at 4:38 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I love this idea and it’s something similar to something Shana Kimball and I talked about when she visited Emory a month ago: flash publishing. How do we publish more or a record of events that happen. This could look something like the Hacking the Academy project from last year’s THATCamp or it could be a something like an archive of a conference backchannel. I agree that peer review does need to be a part of something like a THATPress, but given the increasing scope of the THATCamp community, I think that it might really be possible.
Jack Dougherty
June 2, 2011 at 11:47 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Definitely would like to learn more about this UnPress idea, and also weigh the pros and cons of other models of scholarly communication & publishing (such as MediaCommonsPress and ETC, described above). Let’s also consider the University of Michigan Press digitalculturebooks model, which offers a fascinating hybrid of established academic peer-review AND open-access digital content AND printed books for sale. That’s what caught my attention when Kristen Nawrotzki and I submitted a proposal for our born-digital, open-review edited volume, Writing History in the Digital Age.