E-Publishing in the Humanities: Opportunities and Challenges

Charles WatkinsonDirector of Publications

American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Pratt-SILS Summer School @ UCL

June 21, 2007

What are the “Humanities”?

“The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and

classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics;

the history, criticism and theory of the arts.”

Our Cultural CommonwealthThe Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities

and the Social Sciences (2006). John Unsworth, chair. Available from:

http:// www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure

Who are the players?• University Presses e.g., OUP, Virginia• Commercial Publishers & Aggregators e.g.,

Blackwell, Proquest, Alexander Street Press• Societies and Institutions e.g., MLA, AAA• Libraries e.g., UMich, CDL, HighWire• Collaborations of Scholars e.g., Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy• Technology Firms e.g, Google, Microsoft

Academic Live Search, Open Content Alliance (Yahoo)

. . . and combinations of the above

Types of digital scholarship

• Collection building– Digital surrogates from scanning– Born digital content– Published and unpublished, text & multimedia

• Tool building– Analysis tools– Authoring tools– Collaboration and community e.g., tagging. . . Phased approach. Projects that survive contain a

combination of the above.

JSTOR: Collection building +

• 1996: Founding goals: to preserve scholarly journals in electronic form and provide access to them as widely as possible (250 million significant accesses in 2005).

• 2007: To add tools and value to the resulting aggregation of 24 million pages of content; to integrate new kinds of published and unpublished material; to support and archive (Portico) born digital and multimedia.

JSTOR: 2007 Innovations

• New tools: “My JSTOR” personalization and tagging; faceted searching; indexing by Google; reference linking and DOIs.

• New types of content: Books as well as journals; 19th century British pamphlets (20,000 from 28 JSTOR member libraries); search across ArtStor.

Rotunda: Tool Building

• University of Virginia Press digital imprint.

• Searching tools designed for edited collections of letters (founding fathers and mothers; 19th century writers).

• Analysis tools for “fluid texts.”

Oh, the possibilities . . .

• Accessible from anywhere at any time to anyone with an internet connection.

• Revealing new and unexpected links and allowing multiple interpretations of the primary data.

• Mashing up text, images, databases into a richer scholarly broth.

. . . but, woe, the challenges

• Technical: the ephemeral nature of digital data and problems of archiving; the necessity of standards for interoperability.

• Legal: copyright, the ‘culture of permissions’• Economic: financial sustainability of business

models, lack of cyberinfrastructure.• Social: non-collaborative culture of

scholarship; lack of tenure recognition for digital scholarship (MLA statement).

Case Study: The ASCSA

Founded in 1881. Four main aims:

• Teaching grad sts on Athens campus.

• Supporting research on Greek studies.Blegen (80K) & Gennadius (120K) Libraries, Wiener

Laboratory, Archives, Admin

• Archaeological exploration.Corinth (1896) & the Athenian Agora (1931)

• Publication. Hesperia & monographs

Now: Silo-ed, opportunistic

• Experimental online presence.

• Outsourcing. Where’s my content?

• Questioning of the publishing function; path of least resistance leads to balkanization.

disjointed experience for users. (Atypon vs. JSTOR even different passwords)

Future: Collaborative, integrated

• Everything online to industry standards.

• In-house repository delivered via web.

• Clear levels of editorial intervention; linking published version to supplementary materials.

seamless experience for users.

How to get there? Mellon plan

$291,000 grant in 2006. $1.2 m. from EU.• Build an institutional repository capable of

archiving and presenting all types of media, including archaeological databases, and interoperating with others.

• Reengineer institution so excavations work together to common standards while libraries and publishing share resources. Redeploy staff to focus on digital information creation and management.

problem

method• Search for visual comparanda from other

sites and museums (image collections, illustrations in publications).

• Examine the context it came from (site maps and plans, field notebooks, databases of related finds). Is it from a domestic context?

• Do a literature search, drilling back through references (publications, citation linking).

• Do physical tests, comparing against previous results (scientific databases). Is there burning?

solution

Thank you

Charles WatkinsonDirector of Publications

American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton, NJ

Tel: 1 609 683 0800 x 21

E-mail: cwatkinson@ascsa.org