This document discusses getting to digital publishing at West Virginia University through three parts. The first part discusses the history of Kairotic, an open-access journal. The second part discusses the Vega publishing platform and its features for authors, editors, and venues. The third part discusses the proposed Digital Publishing Institute (DPI) at WVU, including its research focus, outreach, pedagogy, and proposed digital hub within the university libraries.
23. Research in the DPI
support for digital
research projects (e.g.,
tools like Vega,
archives/collections)
research related to
publishing
on- and off-campus
partnerships
un/funded partnerships
25. Pedagogy and the DPI
classes related to DPI
mission
internships; workers
for research projects
affiliated faculty
workshops for
internal/external
constituents
29. c. Inge Ove Tysnes
thank you
@s2ceball
cheryl.ball@mail.wvu.edu
http://ceball.com
http://vegapub.com
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net
http://dpi.lib.wvu.edu
Hinweis der Redaktion
Thank you.
3 parts: Kairos, Vega, DPI (10 min each)
Part One
Job title: Publishing studies (traces my own academic and editorial history) is about theorizing practice and focusing on production in an apprenticeship model with students. Heavily dosed with information literacy, info architectures in the creation of digital texts while also focusing on readers’ needs through specific genres that editors help create.
Digital = media-rich, open-access, design in relation to born-digital work, information architecture, etc.
- distinguishing DP from DH - within and outside of DH
- DH: collaborative, professionalizing, open —> all things C&W has done for a lot longer. (I don’t call myself a DH person unless I need funding)
(for me, longer history of C&W…and all its names, e.g., digital writing studies).
naming the kinds of “knowledge” production in digital writing…
Naming…
Kairos —> publishes research about rhetoric, technology, and writing pedagogy. Just published its 20th anniv issue.
Kairos:
started in 1996
editor since 2001
- premier digital journal in writing studies (15% acceptance rate)
- OA (libre), independent, peer-reviewed
- webtexts
Principal of webtext deisgn: UNIQUE DESIGNS, where form::content meet.
A major goal of webtexts is to enact their rhetorical arguments through design work. (This is a piece from 2009, argument about juxtaposition and wunderkammers facilitating invention)
Webtext principal: Process-based research
In the August 2014 issue of Kairos, interaction design researchers Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, and Timo Arnall (2014) published a peer-reviewed webtext that showcases the design-process methodologies they used to construct a project called “Satellite Lamps.”
As Martinussen (2013) explained, the team explored and visualized “how GPS takes place in urban environments. The team has looked at the relationships between urban space, time and satellite-geometry, and design and has developed instruments and techniques for visualising the presence and the fluctuations of satellite signals.”
The opening video shows how the team’s time-lapse film methodology works to visualise these signals. The three authors worked together to produce the video, as well as curate multiple slideshows from their photographic archive, research additional scholarly materials for the rich transdisciplinary literature review, write the linguistic (written) content, and design the webtext in Ruby (which they had to transfer to HTML for Kairos’s archival purposes).
Kairos isn’t the only one, BUT is the OLDEST & longest-running.
Handmade vs. CMS
—> I’ve studied technical sustainability and longevity of these journals, most of which don’t gave a great track record.
SCHOLARLY: the importance of design as a rhetorical vehicle for scholarly argumentation;
SOCIAL: the available means of assessment and peer-review within a collaborative, open setting; and
TECHNICAL: questions of sustainability of the scholarly work, regardless of form, in the rapidly evolving technological ecosystems of the Internet.
(These infrastructures overlap. All of these infra. come together in Kairos.)
OJS provides technical infrastructure,
What OJS is [editorial workflow]
HOWEVER… [problems w/OJS]
problems with OJS…
look/design
rigid workflows
no mm capabilities
At Kairos, we embrace design as part of the invention process through our mentorship of authors in pre-submission collaborations and through our collaborative peer review process
1996 peer-review via YahooGroups
The problem with reviewing webtexts in this manner – via email – is the problem of translating nondiscursive elements such as page layout or the photos of the author’s daughter into a linear set of words.
In addition, the reviews are asynchronous, which creates gaps of time – sometimes weeks – between responses. While that aids in thoughtful participation by the board, it doesn’t facilitate the kind of immediacy in peer-response that digital media texts sometimes require.
During the peer-review process, we developmentally edit for rhetoricity.
After a piece is accepted for publication, we edit their designs (including the code, as needed) for sustainability, accessibility, and usability. All of these are rhetorical concerns: an author who chooses to design her piece in Adobe Flash chooses a limited set of sustainable, accessible, usable, and readable features that may change over time, or even disappear (see Sorapure). These design choices function as part of a webtext’s scholarly and technical infrastructures as well as part of the social infrastructure of Kairos’s collaborative authorial and editorial workflows.
What and how we edit for design depends entirely on the text in front of us at any given moment.
Are there transcripts?
Are the filenames properly named and formatted?
Do the links work?
Do the images have alt txt?
Are the media files uploaded to the correct server location & contain appropriate metadata?
[WVU Summer Seminar - Melanie Schlosser, accessibility focus. This summer, its on sustainability of ETDs as a scholarly genre.] Sustainability is a whole nothr’ talk when it comes to Kairos. We have been working to sustain our scholarship for 20+ years, and part of how we get there is to take close care of each and every webtext.
Once accepted, a submission runs through our production process.
LOTS of staff. Here: sample copy-editing rotation
Manual version control…
So how do we manage?
All this leads me back to a lack of technical infrastructure that can handle these types of processes for innovative and multimedia journals
—> 15 years working towards CMS, not right funding
rising from the rubble of boring scholarly publishing…
modularity for venues, FREE, multimedia, data sets,
On my trips to Oslo…
based in large part on research 602 students helped conduct in Spring 2015
—> publishing practices of editors and authors. several articles in the works
jump out to PDF
GO SHOW SOME
Behind the scenes….
Asset store, like Github, is fast and co-located for quick delivery. Vega should control its own asset servers (so in case the API doesn’t change). Plug-ins (that others make) work as bridges between Vega and Kora or Hydra.
Q: We need more specific use cases. How do you see asset systems relevant to Vega. Copying/downloading images from repo for asset store for quick delivery (but copyright). PLUG-IN: for Hydra repo to retain control of content so it delivers to Vega a reference (linked image) but keeps original/rights.
—> What IS PUBLISHED?: But when it is deep archived, everything needs to be saved in one place. Is the metadata enough?? Does the media artifact need to be there??
(CAVS ACT) MIT is using SANITY (CMS) as an asset store/IR. It’s a lower level than what Sanity (a toolkit, ready by Summer) can do. Vega would be a second system potentially that could share.
While Vega is a collab project with Norwegians, it will eventually live at WVU, in WVU Libraries, specifically under banner of Digital Publishing Institute.
Arrived at WVU and almost immediately met Jon Cawthorne, Dean of WVU Libraries, who shared my vision of digital scholarship. Official as of January 2016.
whiteboard drawing (still in FLUX) after a DTF meeting (Disappearing Task Force on WVU Library’s Digital Presence in the 21st Century
3 branches of DPI: DH center if it weren’t just H.
- reaching out to faculty
Reframe how digital content is handled at ALL levels of the library. Can’t just be DPI. Can’t just be scholarly comm librarian.
e.g., OA copyright question? — subject librarian is at forefront. sends to scholcomm person, who runs workshops with DPI & subject librarian help.
e.g., new OA initiative in Press? combines forces with WV Regional History Center or special collections and DPI’s pedagogical initiatives to create service publishing opps that promote campus and scholarly missions.
Our initial challenges: workflows (DPLAfest, but Kairos…). Staffing, which we are currently being creative with. Our goal is to be at capacity, producing up to 10 digital projects a year, JUST out of DPI, plus workshops and affiliated classes within 5 years.
timeline = Encourage use cases THIS summer.
release in Fall 2017/Spring 2018